


Your Bloodstained Laurel Wreath

by DesdemonaKaylose, neveralarch



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Angst, Consent Issues, Decepticon Rung, Eventual Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Prisoner of War, Sexual Abuse, Sexual Coercion, Wartime Romance, love as both tragedy and redemption
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-22
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-16 07:13:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 22,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29572299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesdemonaKaylose/pseuds/DesdemonaKaylose, https://archiveofourown.org/users/neveralarch/pseuds/neveralarch
Summary: “Ah,” said Tarn. “CMO Rung. I seem to have found something of… yours.”“I can see that,” said Rung, forcing his voice calm and a little disdainful. “Would you put him down, please?”In a risky move for his situation, Decepticon CMO Rung rescues captive Autobot Pharma from Tarn's custody. But while he expects to be the one protecting Pharma, he now finds himself in a new precarious position with Megatron—both his commander and his estranged lover. And this love is a love that can never seem to entirely let go...
Relationships: Megatron/Rung (Transformers), Pharma/Rung (Transformers), Pharma/Tarn (Transformers)
Comments: 83
Kudos: 93





	1. I Kept a Bird in a Box Beneath My Bed

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Servant Has No Such Ambitions](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16687819) by [DesdemonaKaylose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesdemonaKaylose/pseuds/DesdemonaKaylose). 



> This concept is adjacent to [Banners from the Turrets](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1265390), but different enough in a few foundational ways that we thought it would only be more confusing to include it there. You don't have to read any of those fics to read this one.
> 
> We envision this fic to be dark at times but ultimately cathartic, and as such we have a pretty detailed list of potentially triggering content posted up [over here](https://neveralarch.dreamwidth.org/112356.html) for people who need to know and don't mind spoilers for the full story. In broader strokes, this fic will contain coerced sex, unhealthy relationship dynamics, previous off-screen physical and sexual abuse, betrayal of trust, and an extremely graphic but well deserved murder. This particular chapter contains off-screen wartime violence and off-screen physical abuse.

It was the medical chevron that caught his optic first—they were so short staffed, even on the flag ship, that sometimes Rung dreamed of having extra sets of hands. So many of the nurses that he’d trained in those first helter skelter years of the Decepticon uprising were now heading their own medbays in far flung reaches of the galaxy under commanders like Deathsaurus and Turmoil. And, as the long war dragged on, more still were dead. It was a fight to keep the nurses and doctors Rung still had under his command on the flagship, rather than picked off for new postings or to disappear into Shockwave’s laboratory, reassigned as technicians and somehow never emerging again.

So yes, it was the chevron that Rung’s exhaustion-fuzzy optics picked out first: a flash of white-on-red in the shadow of Commander Tarn’s ostentatiously purple frame.

More details emerged as Rung spared precious time and energy to focus. The strange medic was a jet, his shoulders hunched forward to make himself seem smaller than he was, his hands pulled tight against himself. His paint gleamed with polish, but his wings were held low and defensive. Tarn stopped to exchange pleasantries with Kickback, and the jet pressed himself back against the corridor wall, keeping Tarn between himself and everyone else who might walk by. 

He didn’t have a faction symbol. Odd. Rung was usually the only one around the fleet who avoided patriotic decoration. Rung thought about stopping and asking after his designation, but—No. There was a new ship of casualties docking right at that moment, and Rung had overstayed his admittedly insufficient ration break. He hurried past Tarn with a cursory greeting, and only felt a flicker of surprise when the jet flinched away from his passing glance.

Afterward he only saw the jet at a distance, a moment of recognition followed by a tired dismissal. It wasn’t at all surprising that Tarn had not only managed to acquire a personal medic for his team, but also to keep Rung from knowing of it. The DJD was swimming in resources; the medical division had to make do with half the supplies and personnel they’d once had. Tarn and Rung, by unspoken deliberation, avoided each other wherever possible. They weren’t in competition—at least not openly. It was merely mutual distaste and also a strange, uncomfortable, hungry feeling that hung in the air whenever Megatron was between them. It wasn’t usually hard to avoid each other. Rung was only involved in some of the command meetings these days, and rarely the sort that involved Tarn.

More often, like now, Megatron preferred to keep Rung separate from the rest of command.

“Out of the question,” Megatron said, without looking up from the report in his hands. “Our soldiers can’t afford to waste precious time checking every encampment for medics when they could be advancing the line.”

Megatron’s personal office, unlike more public rooms in the _Nemesis,_ was exactly what anyone who actually knew him would expect. That was to say, neatly organized, bare of frills, and extremely lavender. There was no guest chair. Megatron did not like to encourage visitors to feel overly at home.

In the privacy of the familiar office, Rung simply sat himself on the near edge of Megatron’s desk and spoke from there. “You already have them checking for IEDs, energon stores,” Rung ticked off fingers, “artillery, _defectors._ If you can waste time building the DJD a _shopping_ list—”

“Let me clarify,” Megatron said, “my soldiers can’t afford to hobble themselves in the midst of a forward offensive just so a few Autobot medics can make it to the next prisoner exchange. The Decepticon army is an unstoppable fist of vengeance, a pitiless machine—”

“Megatron, we’re _hemorrhaging_ medical personnel,” Rung said, sitting forward. “Ever since you authorized Motormaster to take out that field hospital, the Autobots have been retaliating faster than I can train a mech in first aid. Do you have any idea what this war will look like if neither side has medics? It’ll be a slaughter.”

Megatron looked prepared to accept this as the price of war. He was still scrolling performatively through his datapad, as if to emphasize that he had better things to do than be harangued.

Rung heard his voice grow that aggrieved, whining quality that he was more and more often unable to shake. “Look,” he said, “we haven’t fired on non-combatants since we were taking potshots at senators from burned out tenements. It’s not as if we don't know how to wage a more civilized kind of war, all you have to do is issue an official order.”

The report screen went blank as Megatron flicked it off, turned it over, and laid it down on the top of his desk. He looked at Rung for the first time in several minutes. Hope flared like a hot little explosion in the core of Rung’s frame.

For a moment he thought Megatron would reach out and pull Rung into his lap, the way he had a thousand times before, when the night was late and the ship was quiet, the way he had two million years ago when they had all seen the casualty numbers coming in from Tesaurus. And on that empty bridge Megatron had murmured to him, so quietly, that he was afraid this would all be for nothing, and Rung had said—

Megatron stood up. He folded his hands behind his broad back, turning away from Rung and towards the view pane that displayed the helm-forward perspective of the ship’s bridge. White and yellow stars scattered against the void there, beyond the blazing center of the nearest solar system. 

There were times when the war still surprised Rung, hitting him all anew, as if he had forgotten that the greatest cataclysm of their species was unfolding around him at every hour, every moment. A civil war stretching out into infinite space like a mirror reflected into a mirror into a mirror.

In those early days, Rung had never imagined that war would begin to feel like _business._ That even under the waves of new patients, old patients, great offensive pushes, scattering wild defensive failures, gorgeous and terrible vistas through the observation deck of a warship—

“My dear,” said Megatron, breaking into Rung’s brief reverie, “you know you’ve never had the stomach for the realities of this struggle. And I do what I can to keep you protected from it, because I consider your wellbeing one of my highest priorities. We each have our roles in this struggle. So don’t tell me how to run my army, and I won’t tell you how to run your medical bay.”

Rung scowled at his back. “If it keeps up like this, I won’t _have_ a—”

But at that very moment, there was a buzz at the door. Rung paused, confused, and twisted to look behind himself.

“That will be Tarn,” Megatron said. “I need to speak with him. You can let yourself out, I trust.”

Rung stared at him. “You scheduled another meeting on top of me?”

The buzzer went off again, politely but more insistent. 

“We have nothing more to say, do we?” Megatron said. “Let him in on your way out.”

Rung opened his mouth, but—but there _wasn’t_ anything more to say, was there? Once, when he and Megatron were more like minded, he could’ve used humor and praise and the occasional none-too-gentle criticism to cajole Megatron into seeing things his way. But they’d had far too many arguments in the last long century of the war to think that he could get away with that now. If Rung wanted something, truly wanted it, he’d have to be ready to meet Megatron’s demands in return. Could he stomach running the medical corps like the war machine so clearly Megatron wanted it to be? Could he bring himself to give up the veneer of old-world, compassionate ethics that he still clung to?

Rung got up and went. Just beyond the threshold, he paused to look back over his shoulder. In the moment before the door shut, he caught Megatron’s gaze fixed on him: inscrutable, knowing, intent.

“Are you done?” asked Tarn, in his deep, musical voice. 

“Yes,” said Rung. “I suppose I am.”

Tarn got up from his seat in the little waiting area, setting aside the old magazines that someone had once abandoned there. His medic got up too, and, out of the corner of his vision, Rung spotted a motion that was _wrong._ He turned, fixed his attention on the dull blue hips, followed the strange and slightly off angle of the descending strut down to a fist-shaped crumple in the metal just above the jet’s ankle.

Rung frowned deeply. “Are you alright?” he asked the jet, before he could hobble after Tarn.

The jet froze, optics darting between Rung and Tarn.

“He’s fine,” said Tarn. “A training incident. Pharma will fix himself up after our meeting, won’t you, Pharma?”

The jet—Pharma—nodded.

“Oh, no need for that,” said Rung, forcing an air of breeziness. “I can pull those dents in less than a minute, with the proper tools. You really shouldn’t try to operate on yourself,” he chastised Pharma, without even a glance at Tarn. “You won’t be able to brace your leg properly, and you could pull one of your tensors.”

Pharma’s lip curled, but he didn’t point out that the injury was much more than a dent. He just stood there, passively waiting to be told who to follow.

“Doctor,” said Tarn impatiently, and then the door to Megatron’s office slid open.

“I’m on a schedule,” snarled Megatron. “What’s taking you so long, Tarn? It’s not like you to keep me waiting.”

It was difficult to read Tarn’s expression behind the mask, but ‘agonized’ and ‘gutted’ were his usual reactions to any form of criticism from Megatron. “My lord,” he said. “Your—Doctor Rung was—”

“One of Tarn’s staff is injured,” said Rung. “I was just offering to take him with me to medbay where he can be seen to.”

“Staff?” Megatron glanced at Pharma. “Oh. _Him._ Yes, fine. Tarn, get in here.”

Tarn took an almost involuntary step toward the office, and Rung took Pharma’s hand in his and tugged him away.

Pharma’s hand tensed, and Rung half-expected him to pull his hand back. But then Pharma went limp and allowed himself to be towed. Rung glanced over his shoulder and found Pharma gazing fixedly at the floor, his face blank.

Rung wanted to say something reassuring, but there were plenty of audials in the corridors and plenty of ways for things to be taken out of context. It would have to wait.

It wasn’t that long of a walk to central medbay. Pharma could have taken it faster, if he wasn’t following someone with smaller legs. If he wasn’t limping tightly with each step. Rung resisted the urge to speed up, to get him on a table as fast as possible.

Pharma didn’t say anything either. Rung kept his grip on Pharma’s hand firm and reassuring.

When they walked into medbay, Ambulon froze with one hand holding, appropriately enough, a tube of antifreeze. The patient it was attached to was dead to the world, as far as Rung could tell.

“Ambulon,” Rung said. “Could you please grab us some nanite cultures from the supply depot? I have the station.”

Rung held his ground, hand still clutching Pharma’s hand, until they were alone. Then he ushered Pharma over to sit on the nearest unoccupied examination table and gently lifted the leg in question. He was relieved that Pharma allowed it; Tarn’s team could be very adversarial, especially toward someone their commander openly disliked.

Rung drew his hands back from the injury. Up close, the ruin of metal told a nasty story. The upward angle of the thumb, the downward crumple—someone with a brutal grip had taken hold of Pharma and dragged him backwards, maybe across the floor, by his leg. It was, unfortunately enough, exactly what Rung had thought it was.

Rung looked up. He couldn’t read anything in Pharma’s face; the only life he betrayed was the cold burn of something that might have been hatred behind his optics.

“Listen,” Rung said, quietly, “I know it’s not my place, but we have rules in this army. If your commander is hurting you—”

Pharma’s expression stayed uncomprehending for a moment, and then his eyes went narrow, glittering coldly. “Hah. You think I’m one of _you.”_

Rung hesitated. “I’m sorry, in what respect am I wrong?”

“I’m not a Decepticon,” Pharma said. “I’ll _never_ be a Decepticon.” His back straightened, and his wings flicked up. “Doctor Pharma of Iacon, CMO at Deltara Facility. I suppose you haven’t heard of it?”

Rung had long ago memorized every known medical facility on either side of the war. He even knew Pharma by reputation, though he hadn’t recognized the name—Deltara was a tightly-run hospital, especially for such a high traffic of patients from the fleet breach sector. Rung’s optics landed on the bare patch on Pharma’s chest where his Autobot insignia must once have rested.

He’d been sanded and repainted. The blue of his armor seemed unblemished.

“You didn’t defect?” Rung regretted the question as soon as it left his mouth. Pharma’s lips pulled into a righteously defiant sneer.

“Oh. Oh dear. Then what...” Rung turned, despite himself, and stared down the hall as if it would provide him with all the explanations that Tarn owed. What was a Decepticon commander doing, dragging around a prisoner on the Decepticon _flagship?_

“Megatron should know about this,” Rung said, dropping Pharma’s leg and taking a step back. “I should—”

Pharma let out a snarl of laughter, locking Rung in place. “You think he doesn’t know? Of course he knows. He knows everything. Tarn wouldn’t clean his own _treads_ without his master’s say so.”

Helplessness welled up in Rung’s throat like hot sludge. He swallowed it down. He’d gotten used to the taste.

He _would_ tell Megatron about this. Megatron surely knew that Tarn had found a medic, and perhaps he knew that Pharma was a prisoner rather than a convert. But he couldn’t know about Pharma’s crushed leg, no more than anyone would learn from a glance. 

If Megatron _did_ know, and allowed it to happen, then—Then Rung would deal with that later. Better to focus on the now.

“Let’s get this fixed,” he said, taking Pharma’s leg up again. He gently manipulated the ankle and listening to the grinding noises that resulted. “I can do that for you, at least.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Pharma sneered. “I wouldn’t trust you with a screwdriver. You can’t just pull out the dents, I need rewelding work.”

“Yes, I know,” said Rung. “And I _won’t_ be doing that, don’t worry. Flatline comes on shift in about ten minutes, he’s our head surgeon. I’ll just get the damaged armor off in the meanwhile. Though it will involve a screwdriver, I’m afraid.” He brandished the smallest screwdriver in the examination station’s toolbox and was rewarded with a flat stare of disdain.

It was amazing how much Pharma bloomed into life outside of Tarn’s sphere of influence. He allowed Rung to make one attempt at removing the pin that held his outer armor to his ankle and then snatched the screwdriver out of Rung’s hand and used the flat head to pry the pin out, contorted on the examination table to reach it.

“Tell _me_ I can’t fix my own leg,” he muttered to himself. “I once rearranged my own internal organs on a _dare._ This is what comes of letting trolleys and scooters and who knows what else play at being medics.” He shot a glare at the wheelpack that Rung wore on his back. “What are you, some sort of trainee nurse?”

“Fleet CMO, actually,” said Rung, watching as Pharma peeled away his crumpled ankle plating. “But my specialty was in psychiatry before the war. Rung. Nice to meet you.”

Pharma froze, in the midst of disconnecting his own internal mobility wiring. “CMO? _Fleet_ CMO?”

“More of an administrator than anything,” said Rung. “Not hands-on like you. What’s your specialty, if you don’t mind me asking?”

But Pharma didn’t say anything else, only went back to work with his lips pressed tight. When his ankle struts were bare, he set his tools down on the table and folded his arms over his cockpit.

He’d done a neat job of it. Demonstrably a field surgeon at the very least—though almost every medic qualified as a field surgeon nowadays. Rung leaned in to peer at the tertiary strut, which had snapped under the strain of the same grip that had crumpled Pharma’s armor.

“Do you think welding will be enough?” he asked. “This really ought to be replaced.”

“Welding has a two-hour recovery period,” said Pharma, tightly. “A strut replacement will have me off my feet for three days. I want to be able to run when I leave here, do you need me to explain why?”

Rung didn’t. He could think of a million replies, but he didn’t think Pharma would appreciate any of them. 

Ambulon came back with the nanite cultures, and Rung gratefully reached for the distraction of repair programming. Then Flatline arrived, late as usual, too busy to be curious about their patient. Rung stood there as Flatline braced and welded Pharma’s strut, his hand out and open in case Pharma decided he needed something to hold.

Pharma didn’t. The flash of defiance was gone now, replaced by a compliance too complete to be anything but practiced. When everything was back in place, he just sat on the examination table until Tarn arrived to collect him.

“He’s still in recovery,” said Rung, looking up at the mountain of Tarn’s bulk. “It’s really no trouble if you leave him with us for a few hours. He shouldn’t be walking at all.”

“I wouldn’t want to impose,” said Tarn, and lifted Pharma in his arms. Pharma brought up one hand to steady himself against Tarn’s chest, then dropped it at Tarn’s look. His wings seemed wedged uncomfortably in the crook of Tarn’s elbow.

“You can have a nice rest in our quarters,” Tarn told Pharma as he carried him away. “And we can talk about _drawing attention.”_

Pharma’s response, if there was any, was too quiet to hear.

“I didn’t know the DJD were recruiting medics now,” murmured Ambulon, once they were gone. “You couldn’t pay me enough to work with Tarn.”

“None of us are getting paid in real money.” Flatline snorted. “Decepticon credits aren’t good anywhere besides the commissary. Anyway, you’ll go where you’re assigned. Thank Rung for making sure you don’t end up kissing Tarn’s feet.”

Ambulon gave Rung a look that was, in fact, worryingly grateful. Rung forced a smile.

\---

Rung paused in front of Megatron’s office for the second time that day, rehearsing what he was going to say. He’d sat in his own office for a long time thinking about it, listening to Ambulon and Flatline bustling around on the med bay floor.

He’d almost decided not to come. He was fully aware he didn’t have the influence he’d once had, the leeway to make _requests._ But he had to try, didn’t he? If he didn’t try, what good was he?

The office door parted for Rung, unlocked. He supposed there weren’t many left who would dare interrupt Megatron’s privacy unannounced. 

An unfamiliar anxiety gripped his throat—should he have made an appointment? But despite everything else it was _Megatron,_ his Megatron, surely they needn’t stand on ceremony when it was only the two of them?

Megatron was silhouetted against the viewing pane, as beautiful and forbidding as a distant moon. What was he thinking about, Rung wondered. Did he long to be out there again, at the thick of the action, where Rung was forbidden to go, ripping through the ranks in the pursuit of Prime? Was it simpler there?

Rung’s throat almost creaked with the effort of getting sound out. “...Megatron?”

The formidable mech turned, his back to the star-scattered abyss, his optics a dark glow in the shadows of his handsome face.

A long, long time ago, Megatron had wanted Rung to receive the brand. Everyone in the Conclave had them. Hot, bubbling, impure, imperfect metal, anodized until it gleamed purple in the light of the forge—ripped straight from the spark casing, for the elite of the elite. 

_I don’t have enough spark casing to maintain integrity,_ Rung had argued. _If you remove what little I have, I’m likely to breach and die._

Megatron had accepted that, with moderate but reasonable displeasure. And then he’d come back, not long after, blazing with the spirit of invention as he suggested Rung have a brand forged from _his_ spark casing. 

Rung had always wondered what would have happened if he’d accepted. Would they still have found each other at odds so often after, have drifted apart so surely? Would he have looked down at his chest with the satisfaction of _belonging,_ or would he have wished he could tear Megatron’s sigil from his frame...

“What?” said the Megatron of now. “Have you come to have another of your tedious arguments with me?”

“I hope not,” Rung said, with some trepidation. He crossed the floor and took up his usual seat on the edge of the desk. “I’ve come to ask you for something.”

Megatron’s gaze narrowed. “Oh really.”

“Yes. I can’t—I don’t have the power on my own, I need you to—” Rung shook his head, started again. “I want Pharma.”

“What, Tarn’s little Autobot?” Megatron made a dismissive sound. “No. I don’t have nearly the patience for the headache that would cause.”

“You said you wouldn't tell me how to run my medbay,” Rung retorted, immediately losing his script in the face of Megatron’s disinterest. “He’s a _surgeon._ He used to be CMO of his own hospital. I’m out here trying to teach former front-liners how to use a nanite patch and Tarn’s dragging a fully qualified Iaconian medic around for his own amusement. I need this, Megatron. If you won’t do anything to help me keep the medics I’ve got, the _least_ you can do is let me take new ones when they’re offered.”

“You have plenty of fine _Decepticon_ medics,” Megatron said. “What do you need some overinflated Autobot for as well? If you’re really so hard up for staff, I suppose I could authorize some non-essential personnel for you to pick through—there might be a few of the techs interested in a transfer—”

This morning Rung would have leapt at the chance to claim a few more Decepticons for the medical corps, but now he blurted out “No! I want Pharma. Please.”

Megatron paused. He looked at Rung with new optics, as if seeing him for the first time, at last fixing the full power of that dreaded processor on Rung and Rung alone.

“Please,” Rung said, taking in a shaky vent. “As a favor. To me.”

After a moment, Megatron unclasped the hands that had been folded so formally behind his back and approached Rung with the sidelong intent of a feline investigating prey. “A favor,” he repeated.

“Yes,” Rung said.

“It’s been a long time since you asked me for favors,” Megatron said. 

Rung swallowed down a lump of something he didn’t care to name. “Yes,” he said, “it has.”

Megatron reached out. His forefinger caught Rung under the chin, lifting his face for a long, inscrutable moment of consideration.

“If it matters so much to you,” he said, at last. “I’ll inform Tarn of the transfer.”

Rung sagged with relief. “Thank you,” he said. Now it would come—whatever concession Megatron wanted in return. An end to the debate about checking for Autobot medics during forward assaults, surely. No pain chips for Autobot prisoners being treated in the medbay? One of Shockwave’s rarely-survived experimental treatments to be instituted as standard procedure? They’d had so many arguments lately it was difficult to keep track.

But: “You’re welcome,” Megatron said. There was a pause, Megatron’s fingers lingering on Rung’s chin when he’d expected them to disappear. Then Megatron’s hand slid up the side of Rung’s face, cupping Rung’s cheek in his enormous palm, and he leaned down until their noses brushed against each other. His lips pressed against Rung’s mouth, delicately, almost more the ghost of a kiss. But when he pulled back, his optics were intense, coal-bright. Rung fought the urge to touch his own lips, to reassure himself that the tingle he felt there was real.

Megatron smiled at whatever he saw in Rung’s face and withdrew. As he rounded the desk he picked up a datapad and set to work on some new missive, fingers flicking across the screen. Rung watched him, exhausted by the effort it had taken to get here but content in the result, all the urgency bled from his frame at last.

Absently, Megatron remarked, “I didn’t particularly enjoy watching Tarn drag that jet around like a turbofox with a chewtoy, anyway.” The screen flashed red, and then white, in his hands. “He thinks he can get away with too much.” 

\---

Rung expected Pharma’s transfer to be contentious. Tarn wouldn’t ignore an order from Megatron, but he didn’t have to be happy about it. 

But when Rung arrived at the medbay that morning, Pharma was standing outside the door clutching a small box of his possessions, and Tarn was nowhere to be seen.

“You could’ve gone in,” said Rung, brightly. “Ambulon should be in there. Much nicer than waiting around in the corridor.”

Pharma didn’t say anything, but he followed Rung inside and set his box down on a side table when prompted. He didn’t have any new dents, and his finish was as neat as Rung had ever seen it. His possessions seemed to consist of several jars of brown sand, a tin of polish, and a medic’s hand file.

“What are these?” asked Rung, gesturing at the sand.

“Don’t touch them,” snapped Pharma, though Rung’s hand hadn’t even been near the jars. “They’re an experiment.”

“Oh, are you still pursuing medical research?” said Rung. “I’m afraid we’ve rather stagnated, it’s so hard to move beyond the next limb reattachment. Ambulon is very interested in expanding our knowledge, aren’t you, Ambulon?”

Ambulon snorted and didn’t look up from where he was cleaning an examination table. “I read old journals, that’s all. Can’t be _too_ interested and risk getting pulled into the science division. Shockwave’s researchers tend to end up as subjects.”

Pharma’s jaw locked and he crossed his arms.

“Don’t worry about that,” Rung hastened to assure him. “You’re part of the medical staff now, and I don’t approve reassignments unless the medic in question asks me for it. You’ll be reporting to me at beta shift, here in the medbay. My office is right next to the storeroom, do you see it?”

He paused to allow Pharma the chance to acknowledge. Pharma didn’t take it, instead glaring at Rung’s antenna and squeezing his crossed arms a little tighter against his cockpit.

“Excellent,” said Rung, as if Pharma had said something after all. It couldn’t be easy, being traded around your enemies’ flagship. Better to just move on and allow Pharma to settle in his own time. “Do you have any questions?”

Pharma’s vents rattled, and then his armor clamped and cut off the sound. “Why?” he rasped.

“Why?” Rung didn’t know what to say, but he had to say _something_. “Can you be more specific?” he tried.

“Why did you take me away from Tarn?” said Pharma, his voice growing stronger. “Am I to be a pawn in your pointless games of intrigue? Do you pity me? Did you envy Tarn his _captive?”_

Ambulon had paused in cleaning the table and was looking at them sidelong.

“I need medics,” said Rung, loud enough to be heard across the room. “That’s all, I’m afraid. Nothing exciting, just a staffing problem.”

Pharma snorted and looked away. “None of your trumped-up murderers will let me operate on them. Not if they know what’s good for them.”

“Okay,” said Rung, briskly. “Thank you for your frankness. I’m sure we can find other work for you to do.”

Pharma’s brows went up, and then they furrowed down. “I won’t play nurse for that Flatline hack.”

There was a small noise as Ambulon suppressed a laugh. Rung shot him a look, but Ambulon was back to cleaning and it wouldn’t do any good to draw attention to what was really hardly even insubordination.

“I _was_ thinking you could be Flatline’s assistant,” said Rung. “He did a nice job on your ankle, didn’t he? And you could treat the Autobot prisoners when they come in, I’m sure they’d be happier to see a friendly face.”

Pharma scowled, but he didn’t say anything to contradict Rung. He’d count that a victory.

“Here’s my comm frequency,” said Rung, pinging it to him. “You can call me if there’s any trouble. And there’s your ration chit, don’t lose it, and your medic’s credentials. Air Commander Starscream will be taking you to your bunk in the air force barracks. You’re not to go anywhere without an escort, but Starscream will give you a list of authorized flyers. Anyone in the medic command structure can supervise you as well.”

“I’m not staying with you?” said Pharma, looking down at the little hard copy data chips Rung had pressed into his hands.

“Oh, no,” said Rung. For some reason that made Pharma’s face go very complicated, so Rung added, “you’ll be working with Flatline? Like we discussed? Ultimately I am your supervisor, of course, but I’m not a surgeon. Most of my time in the medbay is spent filing reports and doing inventory. I think you’d be rather wasted as my assistant.”

Pharma bit his lip. Rung waited for a moment, but then Starscream pinged him impatiently. He’d been waiting outside for a whole thirty seconds, a scandal.

“Do you have any other questions?” asked Rung. “I’m happy to answer them, only Commander Starscream is ready to show you the barracks.”

“I’d like to be your assistant,” said Pharma, every word slow and halting, as if it was being dredged up with a great and unwilling effort. “You’re a kind mech. I could do things for you.”

“I’m sure you could, but don’t worry,” said Rung, forcing a chipper tone. “Flatline may look tough, but he’s a good medic, and very amiable with nurses. Not that you’ll be a nurse, of course,” he babbled, when Pharma glared at him. “I just think it’s a good sign from a surgeon, don’t you? Anyway, here’s the commander.”

He pinged the door to open, revealing Starscream lounging in the corridor.

“Oh, are you finally ready?” Starscream stretched, squeezing every ounce of melodrama from what was barely even an inconvenience. “I was thinking of taking a nap, don’t rush on my account.”

Rung gave Starscream a look which he hoped communicated ‘play nice with Pharma and don’t try to scare him, the mech’s already had it bad enough.’ Starscream just gazed back with a bland little smile. Rung would have to trust that the conversation he’d already had with Starscream on the matter had been clear enough and strident enough to stick.

“He’s all yours,” said Rung, giving Pharma a gentle nudge in Starscream’s direction. “Remember you have my comm, Pharma. Just let me know if you have any problems or questions or anything at all. I’ll see you back here for your shift.”

Pharma nodded stiffly and retrieved his box before taking a step toward Starscream, his wings held low and close against his back.

“Come on,” said Starscream. “And get those wings up, you look like a rotary.”

When the door closed behind Pharma, his wings held high with affront, Rung breathed out a sigh of relief. That was one good deed done for the day, at least. He didn’t get many chances at those anymore.

There was a splash as Ambulon wrung sterilizing fluid into his bucket. “Great find, boss,” he drawled. “He’ll fit right in.” 

“Hush,” said Rung. “I’m sure he’ll warm up to us eventually.”


	2. Briseis Among the Greeks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You don’t have to do that,” Rung said, in a calm voice that felt like it was coming from several fathoms away. “Please put your panel back on.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains a snarl of consent issues, implications of past abuse, and brief sexual content.

Aglet leaned back in his chair and took a sip of his tea. “Oh, and there’s a report from Glit,” he said. “Looks like he’s still holding the line at that outpost—said some Autobots got pretty close to the field hospital but Deadlock was hanging around and tore the scouts’ heads off. Lucky break.”

“That’s one word for it,” muttered Rung. He wasn’t under any illusions about Glit’s long-term chances—about the chances for any of his medics. He’d argued with Megatron when Glit was first sent to the front, but Megatron had said his troops needed the support and the fact was, he’d been right. It wasn’t his fault that Rung stayed awake long into his off-shifts, reading the casualty lists, looking for the mechs he’d trained. Except, of course, in all the ways that it was.

When Rung went into active combat zones, which had once been rare and now could be better termed as ‘never,’ he was always accompanied by a full squadron of guards. For his protection, Megatron assured him. 

“Have we heard from Spinister?” he asked.

“Not since he went AWOL,” said Aglet, spreading his long, six-fingered hands. “Captured, dead, or just jumped ship. I’m hoping he went neutral. He was a pretty good surgeon, but the stress was getting to him.”

It was funny, the way Aglet talked about ‘stress.’ He seemed so impervious to it—so different now from the nervous, scrawny communications mech who’d been assigned to Rung’s medbay when the war was still limited to Cybertron. He’d taken to administration even quicker than he’d learned therapy, and now Rung looked at his straight back and ironic smile and wondered how he could learn to be as casually, effortlessly competent as Aglet.

“That’s it for the reports,” said Aglet. He made a subtle face at his tea, then flattened his expression when he noticed Rung looking. “Anything you want me to follow up on between meetings?”

“Hmm.” Rung took a sip of his own tea. “Is everything all right with Pharma? I don’t want to pry into your sessions, only…”

Only something was, quite evidently, _not_ all right with Pharma. 

When Pharma had reported for his first shift, he’d performed all his duties with a distinct air of distaste that suggested that washing tools and tying off Flatline’s sutures was firmly beneath him.

When he’d reported for the second shift, his optics were oddly dull and he responded to questions, if at all, with vague monosyllables. Rung had suspected stress was the culprit and assigned Pharma to daily check-ins with Aglet, which Pharma had accepted without complaint. Or, indeed, any other visible reaction.

A full ten shifts later, Pharma was working quietly and rather badly as Flatline’s assistant. He had a tendency to drop tools as he was handed them, and he’d stare into space for hours if left to himself. It could be dedicated non-compliance, but Rung had thought Pharma rather too proud to let himself be perceived as incompetent.

“There’s nothing to pry into,” said Aglet. “He doesn’t talk to me unless I get him mad enough to bring out the insults. I spent a couple sessions just watching him sit there, but now I’m trying to convince him to just spend the time napping on my couch. No luck so far, but eventually he’ll be recharge-deprived enough that he might forget that I’m an evil, siphoning Decepticon and go for it.”

“Siphoning? Really?”

“At least we know what he thinks of us,” Aglet said, dryly.

Rung frowned. “Why isn’t he recharging?”

“He won’t sleep in his berth.” Aglet shrugged. “I asked Ramjet to keep an optic on him in the seeker barracks, and he said Pharma just sits up all night, glaring at anyone who makes a noise as they roll over and clutching at that box he’s got. Ramjet tried to tell him that he’s under protection, you know, that no one’s gonna mess with him? But that just made it worse.”

“Oh, dear.” Rung resisted the urge to gnaw on a fingertip. Of course, he should’ve expected that an Autobot prisoner wouldn’t rest easy among Decepticons. But there wasn’t anywhere else to _put_ him. The cell blocks weren’t fit for habitation, in Rung’s disregarded opinion, especially not when they were so frequently used for interrogation as well. He’d considered giving Pharma his own quarters, but the work-release agreement Megatron had given him clearly specified that Pharma would be under constant supervision. The seeker barracks had seemed a good compromise. _Rung_ knew that Starscream wouldn’t tolerate any break of discipline, especially when Rung had asked him to make sure Pharma would be left alone. But Pharma had no reason to trust those assurances.

Thinking back now, Rung realized that Pharma brought his box with the experiments and maintenance tools into the medbay every day. He must be terrified that they’d be stolen or worse...

“Where did he sleep before?” he asked.

“Primus knows,” said Aglet. “The foot of Tarn’s berth, probably.”

Rung huffed. “I hope we can do a _little_ better than that.”

“Well,” Aglet said. “I did have… an idea.”

\---

Several hours later, Rung thanked Scavenger and Bonecrusher as they set down the additional recharge berth newly relocated from the seeker barracks in the far corner of Rung’s not-overlarge habsuite. There had been some debate about how the room should be arranged.

“We can’t put _your_ berth in the corner,” Aglet had said, pressing his plethora of fingers to his forehead. “What is that going to look like? Please think about this.”

“I am thinking about this,” Rung said mildly. “It makes sense. I’m smaller, and so is my berth. I don’t have wings to accidentally smack against the walls if I get up the wrong way, either.”

“You’re an _officer,”_ Aglet said. “You're _my_ superior, how’s it going to look for all of us when you let some random Autobot prisoner push you out of your own room? What about when word gets around to Hook? You know Hook’s been gunning for your position since he joined, and he sure doesn’t need any encouragement.” 

Rung considered this with some uneasiness. Politics had never been his strong suit, not in this army with all its blatant plays for power and shifting momentary alliances. Not like Starscream, who seemed to thrive in it. When push came to shove, Rung had very much relied on Megatron’s weight at his back to shore up his rational but often unpopular policies. Suddenly, at the stark reminder in Aglet’s words, Rung felt… exposed. 

“Besides,” Aglet had added, seeing that Rung had begun to waver, “if you were sleeping in enemy territory, wouldn’t you want a wall at your back?”

Now Rung surveyed the results with a nervous optic. All his personal things were moved to the starboard shelf, his models stacked up tight like a little fleet, his odds and ends and souvenirs dusted and neatly rearranged. He picked up a fossilized mollusk that Deadlock had brought back for him, on the last reassignment. Blue and orange fire glittered in its pressed depths. Strange, what death left behind.

From the open door behind him, there was a knock. Rung turned to face Aglet and, a few steps behind him, Pharma, who was looking demonstrably worse for the wear. The blue accents of his paint were worryingly thin and matte. He was still holding that little box tight against his chest.

“Pharma,” Rung said, warmly—although not too loudly—and tried to usher the mech inside. It took a little prodding from Aglet to get him through the door. “Now, I know it must be odd to be shuffled around the ship like this, but I think you’ll be more comfortable here than the barracks. You’ll still need an escort elsewhere on the ship, but you’re allowed to be alone in this room without me. It’s very secure, and I can lock it remotely. No one can get in without my say-so. Do you follow me, Pharma?”

Pharma just stared at him, his wings flattened in a posture that was becoming very familiar to Rung. 

“I know it’s a little… unorthodox,” Rung said. 

Pharma looked from the center bed, visibly Rung-sized, to the seeker berth squeezed into the corner. The room was not that big. Space was at a premium on a fleet ship; even officers couldn’t allot themselves all that much.

“I set aside a shelf for you,” Rung said, a little too earnestly even to his own audials, and hastened over to the portside wall to show him the smaller shelf, really just an open faced rectangle of cheap material, wedged into the corner at the foot of the berth. 

He patted a hand on the top of it, with a soft little _thok thok._ “I know between us it’ll be a little cramped, but I’m confident that we can learn to respect each other’s boundaries. I have a few things of my own—” Rung waved at the starboard shelf, “—here, just knicknacks mostly. You’re allowed to touch them, but please handle them carefully if you do. I’m sorry to say that these days they’re nearly all irreplaceable.”

At the continued silence, Aglet mercifully poked his conversational head in. “If you have concerns, just so you know, we can talk about them.” For a moment, his mouth pulled just a degree to the left, unhappy. “Medical staff looks out for medical staff, around here.”

“You’re not _medical_ staff,” Pharma snapped, roused out of his eerie passivity. “you’re just a radio dish with a notepad.”

Aglet exchanged a look with Rung. “That’s the spirit,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow at 0600, Pharma.”

And then they were alone. Rung kept his body language approachable, loose, and pleasant—this was considerably easier said than done, in the heavy heavy awkward silence that followed. Eventually Rung couldn’t stand the stillness anymore, and started bustling for the sake of it, fiddling with the arrangement of items on the shelf, and then fluffing the couple of worn pillows he’d managed to keep his hands on all these vorn.

While he was leaning over the berth, fussing with the pillows, Pharma moved for the first time. Rung watched him from the corner of his vision as Pharma set his box down on the floor and then came over, crossing the room in a few short strides, and set a hand down gingerly on the flat of the berth. 

“So,” Pharma said. His voice was stiff. “This is where you want me?”

“Oh!” Rung said, “Oh, no, Pharma, no, the big berth is yours, not this one.” He fought down a wince, somewhat alarmed at the suggestion that he would play those kinds of mind games with a dependent mech.

Pharma frowned. His palm, which had been flat against the berth top, curled sharply and dragged fingertips over the metal.

“Do you want me to lay down?” he said.

“You... certainly can if you want,” Rung said, a little concerned now. “I can imagine you’re tired. I’ll be up for a while yet answering memos, but I can dim the lights for you.”

Pharma just looked at him, as if he hadn’t quite processed what Rung had said. He must be very sleep deprived. 

“Here,” Rung said, and picked up one of his pillows. “You can take this one.”

No response. Rung nearly had to push the thing into Pharma’s chest before he actually took hold of it. Rung stepped back, giving the whole length of the jet a critical once over.

“I have things handled,” Rung told him. “The day is over, and you’re safe here. You can let yourself rest.”

And then he sat himself down in the little chair at the little desk at the portside corner of the room, and started opening up memos from Starscream detailing exactly how everyone on this ship was failing to maintain acceptable standards except, of course, for him. 

After a while, there was a creak from the far side of the room. Rung resisted the urge to look up. He simply kept tapping at his screen, while the muted sounds of a heavy frame climbing into a berth dissipated. After a while, he dimmed the habsuite lights.

\---

Sharing space with Pharma proved to be surprisingly easy. Almost too easy. Pharma never hogged the washrack or slept through his alarm. He was so quiet Rung sometimes forgot he was there.

In fact, Rung would have liked it if Pharma had taken up a little _more_ space. His portside shelf remained empty—Rung only caught glimpses of his box when he came into the room and saw Pharma shoving it under his berth. 

But Pharma looked better. He was back to irritable competence in the medbay, and he’d even done a ten-minute belt replacement on an Autobot prisoner that Flatline had readily admitted would’ve taken him an hour. Something was working.

Rung wasn’t sure how easily Pharma slept when he was in the room, so he made an effort to stay out a little later, do a little extra work, take a more leisurely ration break in the mess. Megatron had been scheduling more meetings with him too, which was both convenient and gratifying. Sometimes Megatron wanted the medbay report, but sometimes he had a question about medic deployments or first aid training that once would’ve been the subject of a terse comm message. It was nice to be _consulted_ again.

Rung smiled at his paperwork in his office. Finding Pharma felt like a paradigm shift. The only thing that would make it better was if—

Voices filtered through Rung’s open door. “—Don’t see why it matters if one of his legs is a little shorter than the other, maybe it was like that in the first place.”

“Flatline,” said Pharma, imperiously, “if you were in _my_ medbay I’d have you demoted to spare parts scavenging. In a minefield, preferably.”

“Fine,” said Flatline, “then you can scrounge up the sheet metal I need to make him a heel.”

“Ambulon’s in charge of the metal supply, Ambulon—”

“I’m changing the coolant valves, I’m busy.”

_“Fine,_ if I’m surrounded by incompetence I _suppose_ I’ll have to pick up the slack!”

—if Pharma would _talk_ to him.

\---

A medbay run by Chief Medical Officer Rung was a different sort of hospital than any with which the average doctor was likely to be familiar. Unlike, say, Ratchet—who was so famously hands-on that Rung would have heard about it by now even if he _hadn’t_ already been passingly aware of Ratchet before the war, when the mech was only a prestigious politician’s doctor—Rung did not perform operations. Rung did not take charge of emergency surgeries forwarded to him by a nurse performing triage. Typically, Rung _was_ triage.

Rung’s logic, back when the army was only just being scrapped together with rivets and prayers, was this: he had never received surgical training, did not have the modifications to perform it, and realistically did not have the time to learn and/or mod himself. What he could do on the floor was triage, when triage was necessary, and provide basic support to whomever was currently in need of extra hands. If Hook was shouting for a shop vac to get contaminants out of an open chest cavity, Rung could find and deliver the shop vac. He had a cool helm under pressure and a reassuring demeanor. He was good at meetings and requisitions. He had his own strengths.

Besides, a supervisor should have the freedom to go wherever the problem is at any given time. Once a surgeon begins a surgery, he cannot leave until the patient is stable. Rung had the freedom to multitask without endangering lives in the process.

He had repeated this to himself enough times that he usually believed it. Anyway, what was the alternative? _Hook?_ Rung shuddered to think of the jungle law they would all end up in.

What all of this meant, in the here and now, was that Rung had no more pressing duties than sitting by the medbay entrance and watching Pharma in his natural element.

A transport from the front had arrived mere hours ago, bearing Autobot captives destined for Soundwave’s interrogation cells and Decepticon warriors too injured to remain on the front. Rung had quickly sorted through the medbay arrivals, sending most of the Autobots to Pharma at a separate station so he wouldn’t be tempted into any medical sabotage nor pick any further fights with Flatline. Rung didn’t feel especially good about the fact that his orders were only to stabilize the Autobots so they’d be sturdy enough for interrogation… but it was better, surely, than leaving their wounds untended.

Pharma had certainly taken to the work. His hands were clever and sure, a pleasure to watch as he stopped an internal bleed in the rotary who was his current patient. He even had a rather charming bedside manner, smiling at the rotary’s attempts to cover up his pain and anxiety with jokes about Decepticon sexual functions.

There seemed to be something bothering him now, however. He was rummaging through one of the drawers in his workstation, his other hand still holding the rotary’s auxiliary energon line shut. “Clamps!” he shouted, apparently to the world at large. “I’m out of clamps over here and—”

“They’re in the storeroom,” said Flatline, in the middle of disconnecting the remains of an unconscious lieutenant’s arm. “Can you bring me some extras when you get them?”

“I _can’t_ get them,” snapped Pharma. “If I take my hand out of this mech he’ll—” he cut himself off. “Don’t worry,” he assured the rotary, who’d gone still and silent on the table. “You’ll be fine. I have you. I just need _someone_ to get me _clamps!_ Ambulon!”

“Ambulon went to get that energon transfusion,” said Flatline. “He’s not—”

Rung was already dashing into the storeroom. He retrieved a whole box of clamps and came back at a run, just in time to see Pharma baring his teeth at the Flatline, who’d finished with the arm and was now standing only barely out of biting range.

“I’m just saying,” said Flatine, “I can hold his lines while you get the clamps. I’m trying to do you a favor, Pharma.”

“You’re _not_ touching my patient,” said Pharma. His hands were steady, but the tips of his wings were beginning to tremble with stress. “ _You_ get the clamps.”

“Yeah, no, I’m not leaving you unsupervised with half a dozen injured Decepticons—”

“Your clamps, Doctor,” said Rung, offering the box.

Pharma lashed out and snagged two without even looking. “Is everyone here useless besides me?” he complained, as he carefully clamped the rotary’s line above and below the split, preparing it to be resealed. “Can’t keep the workstations stocked, can’t supervise a cooperative prisoner, can’t even perform a _basic_ surgery without begging my advice. You all jabber about ‘functionism’ and ‘oppression’ and you can’t admit that you were simply too _incompetent_ to handle _living_ in a _society.”_

The rotary laughed, a coughing, hacking laugh. “You tell ‘em, doc. Hey, do the little orange guy next. What’s he even turn into?”

Pharma’s face froze. He looked up, his optics slowly tracking from the box Rung was still holding in his hands to the slight smile Rung wore on his face. Flatline cleared his vocalizer and turned back to his patients.

“Well,” said Rung, lightly. “I won’t demand you be nice to your captors, Pharma, but a ‘thank you’ would have been appreciated.”

A small buzz of static escaped Pharma’s mouth. He ducked his helm back down and carefully, meticulously sealed the rotary’s line. Then he removed the clamps, and screwed the rotary’s chest plate back into place. _Then_ he dropped his tools to the floor and ran out of the medbay like the unmaker himself was dogging his heels.

Rung could hardly restrain himself from gaping. Pharma _fleeing? Now?_

“Yeah!” yelled the rotary, jangling the stasis cuffs that held him locked to the examination table. “Fragging _escape!”_

“Boss,” said Flatline, looking helplessly between his patients and the open medbay door.

“I know,” said Rung, belatedly making chase. “I’ll handle it.”

Pharma’s legs were longer, his engine more powerful. Rung was grimly certain that he was up for a hunt if he didn’t want to alert security—and he desperately didn’t want to alert security. He’d been in the middle of establishing _trust_ with Pharma. Yes, Pharma wouldn’t talk to him. But he shared space, he recharged, he traded barbs with Flatline and Ambulon. If Rung had to have Pharma dragged back to his custody, they wouldn’t even go back to square one. They’d be off the game board entirely.

Despite his worries, Rung didn’t feel particularly relieved when he rounded a corner and found Pharma there, dangling from where his wrist was caught in Tarn’s implacable fist.

“Ah,” said Tarn. “CMO Rung. I seem to have found something of… yours.”

“I can see that,” said Rung, forcing his voice calm and a little disdainful. “Would you put him down, please?”

Tarn set Pharma on his feet, but he didn’t let go of his wrist. “You ought to keep a close watch on this one, Doctor. Nothing good comes of letting him run free.”

“I’ll take care of my own staff, thank you,” said Rung. It wouldn’t do to show Tarn any sign of weakness that would doubtlessly be reported to Megatron. He invented wildly instead: “Doctor Pharma was doing an errand for me. Imagine my surprise when he activated his distress beacon instead of coming back with the rations I’d sent him for.”

Tarn considered him. Rung held his vents and hoped that Pharma would play along—wouldn’t run again. Tarn resembled nothing so much as a massive ancient predator in that moment, waiting for a flicker of movement on which to spring.

But then he rolled his shoulders back and let Pharma go.

“It’s alarming to see Autobot prisoners roaming the hallways,” he said, hypocritically. “You should get him something—a hall pass, perhaps? A collar? Not every Decepticon will know who he belongs to.”

Pharma had skittered a few steps toward Rung and then stopped just out of reach, his arms wrapped around himself as if to protect his fragile glass cockpit.

“The medic’s crosses should be more than enough,” said Rung, frostily. “Come along, Pharma. I suppose I’ll have to come with you to fetch our rations after all.”

It wasn’t until they’d walked around a corner and Tarn was out of sight that Rung’s shoulders relaxed. His fuel pump was pounding. He looked sidelong at Pharma, but he couldn’t seem to catch the mech’s optic.

“You needn’t have run,” he murmured. “Rudeness isn’t a capital offense.”

“Of course, sir,” said Pharma, with an awful sort of blankness. “I’m very sorry. I’ll make it up to you.”

\---

The rotary was gone by the time they returned to the medbay. Flatline was finishing up repairs on the last Decepticon casualty, only sparing a curious glance at Rung and Pharma in between welds. Ambulon was back and cleaning energon stains off the gurneys, apparently oblivious to the drama he’d missed.

Pharma went back to his workstation and picked up the box of clamps Rung had dropped in his hurry. He quietly refilled the appropriate drawer in his workstation, then went to Hook’s empty one and did the same. Rung watched as he did a careful circuit around the room, ending by setting the box near Flatline’s station, out of the way so as not to disturb Flatline during surgery. It was nice to see him so helpful, even if his wings were held tense against his back and his expression was still frozen and lifeless. Maybe this was what he’d meant by ‘making it up to’ Rung. He’d relax as time went on and he didn’t face any harsher punishment than the light scolding Rung had already given him.

It must have been a bad shock, to see Tarn looming there as he tried to flee. They’d have to have a quiet evening in, rest and reset. Rung had a few energon cubes in his room—enough that they wouldn’t need to brave the crowded mess to get their evening rations. Maybe he could get Pharma interested in a board game. He’d managed to hold on to a couple, over the centuries. They could play, for a while, until Pharma was settled enough to sleep. Yes, that sounded nice.

Pharma kept restocking various little medical necessities until the shift change bell rang. Then he just stood, leaning on the examination table at his workstation with both hands, unil Rung came over to get him.

“Pharma?” Rung could see the poor mech was shuddering, his blunt fingers scraping against the surface of the table. “Are you ready to go?”

No response. Rung reached out to touch Pharma’s arm, and Pharma flinched hard before he forced himself to still. Rung pulled his hand back, internally chiding himself. He knew better than that.

“Are you ready?” he repeated, softly.

Pharma took a steadying vent, then straightened to a ramrod stiffness and came away from his workstation. Rung nodded to Flatline and Ambulon as they left, and waved to Hook on his way in, then took a left down the main corridor.

“We’re not going to the mess?” asked Pharma.

“I thought we’d just go directly to my quarters,” said Rung. “I think that’s best, don’t you?”

Silence again. When Rung glanced over his shoulder, he found Pharma staring at his own feet, apparently absorbed in the task of walking.

A board game seemed unlikely, then. It would’ve been a stretch anyway, given their lack of conversation. Pharma would surely prefer an early night.

But when they reached Rung’s quarters, Pharma didn’t go to his jet-sized berth squeezed against the wall. Instead he sat on Rung’s berth, watching Rung with overbright optics as Rung checked the encryption on the door.

“There,” said Rung. “All safe and secure, just the two of us. Now, what would you like to do for your off-shift?”

Pharma took another one of those deep, steadying vents. “Please allow me to apologize to you. Sir.”

“Oh, that’s really not necessary,” said Rung. “You were stressed, I understand. A good thing to talk to Aglet about, I think, if you—”

Pharma wasn’t listening. Instead he was leaning back and, as Rung hesitated in his reassurance, sliding off the panel that covered his interfacing array.

His spike was recessed, but he didn’t waste any time in stroking two fingers over his node and then dipping them into his valve. “Please, sir,” he said, in a voice that was possibly meant to sound husky but mostly sounded thick with dread, “I said I would make it up to you.”

Rung froze. For just a second, just enough time for the reality of the situation in which he’d found himself to coalesce hideously in his processor. The hallway, the medbay, the damage he’d found on Pharma’s plating the first day that they met. The glittering wet depth Pharma was even now offering up to him.

“You don’t have to do that,” Rung said, in a calm voice that felt like it was coming from several fathoms away. “Please put your panel back on.”

If anything, Pharma only looked more tense now. His optics were almost white with the pressure of light. “Please,” he said, “I—I want you to.”

“Pharma,” Rung said, “panel _on,_ please.”

Pharma stared at him. And then he snatched his fingers out of his valve, baring his teeth in vicious frustration.

“What?” he said, “this isn’t good enough for you? You want me to crawl on my knees, prostrate myself, beg for your spike?” Even as he said it, he was gripping the edge of the berth and pushing off of it, leaving lubricant in glittering fingerprints. He hit the floor, knees first, and came crawling forward.

The little part of Rung’s processor that handled threat analysis, which he kept firmly restrained by habit, threw up several warning flags at the sight of a powerful jet frame stalking towards him across the floor. The fact that Pharma would eventually be executed if he harmed Rung was not really a reassurance in the moment, when harm was quite immediately possible and there was not a lot Rung could do to stop him. He took a stumbling step back, then another.

“I want you,” Pharma said, but not in any sort of pleasant or beguiling way. His intensity was too high, almost a parody of seduction. “I want _you,_ not Tarn, I’m so _grateful_ you _rescued_ me. Let me—let me show you—”

He’d managed to back Rung into a corner, and was now shakily tugging at Rung’s panel. Rung struggled with the frightful pounding of his fuel pump, resisting the urge to break and bolt for safety. He forced himself to steady, and pulled in a few deep vents to cool his frame. Then he placed his hands over Pharma’s, and made them still.

“Stop,” he said.

Pharma yanked against his grip, wings moving jerkily with each frantic tug. Rung wasn’t strong enough to keep him pinned, not from this angle. He let Pharma reel back, but kept hold of both hands as they went. Pharma thrashed. 

“Pharma!” Rung said, struggling to maintain his grip. “Pharma, I want to let you go but I need to know you’re going to stop. Are you going to stop?”

Pharma looked up at him, paused for a moment in his panic, and for one moment there was nothing in his face but pure, unadulterated loathing. 

Then he nodded. Rung let his hands go.

Pharma tucked them close, in a gesture Rung now recognized as an instinct to protect vulnerable, sensitive, _important_ medic hands. Then his helm bowed and he curled back into himself, like something wounded, at Rung’s feet. A lead weight of exhaustion and dread sank to the bottom of Rung’s tank.

“Thank you,” he said, softly. “I appreciate that.”

Pharma uncurled just enough to glare.

“Do you want to tell me what that was about?” Rung said, although he had a very depressing suspicion that he already knew. But he thought it better not to put words in Pharma’s mouth, if he could avoid it.

“I was apologizing,” Pharma said, gritting the words out. “I was disrespectful. I ran. I’d rather apologize than be punished.”

Rung hesitated. “Okay,” he said. “Does Tarn… require you to do that?” 

“I offered,” Pharma said. His tone was hollow. “It was my choice.”

“Is it always your choice when you…” What was a diplomatic way of saying this. “Apologize… physically?”

“I wasn’t ordered,” Pharma said, in that same dull voice. “It was my idea.”

Rung carefully considered the twitching wings, the arms wrapped tight around chassis and spark, the hands tucked under protective elbows. There was a lot of missing ground between “it was my idea” and “I wanted it.” Crumbling ground, like cliffs falling down to the sea.

“Some might argue,” he said, still feeling his way forward, “that any consent under these circumstances is fiction, at best.”

Pharma grimaced. His gaze slid towards an unoccupied stretch of wall. “Tarn likes the fiction. ‘Decepticon officers do not weaken the cause for their own gratification.’ Isn’t that what your ridic—what your _code_ says?” He squeezed himself impossibly tighter, his open valve hidden by his thighs. “Tarn had to be _convinced,”_ he muttered.

Rung considered him. After a moment, he sank down to his own knees (carefully; he wasn’t in his best physical shape these days) and folded his hands in his lap. He’d like to reach out, to touch Pharma—to reassure him, hold him—but he wasn’t deluded enough to believe his touch meant anything to Pharma now but more misery.

“I’m not angry,” he said. “There’s nothing you have to apologize for, and no punishment to be avoided. I’m not some wrathful god that needs to be appeased. If you’d like to go somewhere else, if you’d like to talk to someone—Aglet—”

“No, don’t make me leave,” said Pharma, quickly. “I told you, I want _you,_ not Tarn or any of these other—” He cut himself off. “I’m sorry I was too—forward,” he muttered, instead of whatever he’d been about to say. “If you’d just tell me what you’d like I can do it for you.”

“No,” said Rung, shakily. It clawed at his spark that a few days of normal work and quiet nights had Pharma so desperate to stay. “No, I don’t need anything. I’m not going to hurt you, Pharma. I know you don’t have any reason to believe me. I know there’s nothing I can do tonight that will prove it to you. But you’re one of my mechs now, and I take that responsibility seriously.”

Pharma said nothing. His wings were trembling with the strain of keeping them low. 

“I think it would be good for you to talk to Aglet,” said Rung. “It doesn’t have to be now, but in the morning? He could tell you about your, your options. I promise he won’t share anything you tell him in confidence, not with any of the officers. Not even with me.”

Still, Pharma said nothing. Was Rung imagining it, or was he curled tighter than before? As if Pharma was still waiting for the hammer to be dropped?

Rung sighed. He stood up again, walked past Pharma—who flinched away as he passed—and retrieved Pharma’s modesty panel where it lay forgotten on the berth. He offered it out to Pharma, waiting patiently until the jet finally reached out and took it back.

“Tomorrow we’re going to go back to work,” Rung said. “And I won’t hold anything that happened today against you, and I won't be any different than I have been. I promise you, there’s nothing in this room you need be afraid of.” 

He went over to his desk and set his glasses aside there, pausing to rub the bridge of his nose for a moment, where Pharma wouldn’t see it. Allspark, what a mess.

“I’m going to lay down,” Rung said, forcing himself to turn back to look at Pharma’s huddled form. “When you feel ready, go ahead and do the same. In your own berth. Please.”

Heavy-limbed and all at once exhausted down to his very struts, Rung levered himself up on the him-sized berth and went fumbling around for the recharge cord, fuzzy-opticed. Eventually he got himself plugged in and laid back, aware of the thick silence in the room as Pharma watched him, wary and tense, a pair of blue lights in the dimness.

And to think he wanted to play _board games,_ tonight.


	3. Stargazing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Megatron hummed as he poured the highgrade. “And how is Pharma?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains discussion of sexual assault policies and past sexual abuse, as well as explicit (consensual but not negotiated) sex.

Rung worked whatever shift he preferred, and did whatever duties he thought necessary—which meant, today, that he was sitting at his favorite table in the empty mess and rereading the Decepticon code.

_Rape sows discord and dispirits morale among the ranks. Decepticon officers do not weaken the Cause for their own gratification._

Rung winced. He’d never been comfortable with Megatron’s pragmatic position on the topic of sexual assault, although he’d understood—he’d thought he understood—how presenting it that way would make it more convincing to less sentimental types. At least it meant there _was_ a policy. There was even a reporting form, to be delivered to the alleged offender’s superior.

Rung looked at the blinking text entry box at the top of the form.

“What has you looking so sour?” Starscream dropped into the seat opposite him, two brimming rations in his hands.

“Administrative duties,” said Rung, setting the datapad down on its face. “I’ve already had my ration.”

“These are both for me,” said Starscream, though he’d already begun setting a ration in front of Rung before he snatched it back. A little energon slopped over the side of the cube, and Starscream licked the spill off his finger. “I’ve been running support missions all week. Our dear, beloved leader can’t bear to admit that the army is overextended. Did you know he’s authorized an invasion of—what was that little planet again? The one with all the little flying things, and the massive energon deposits? Probat.”

“Oh, no,” said Rung. “I thought we’d agreed to limit resource mining to unoccupied planets only.”

“Shockwave thinks Probat is more strategically convenient.” Starscream grimaced. _“I_ said that if we start strip-mining occupied planets, we’ll find ourselves fighting a dozen new fronts. The new Prime does love his squishy organics. But I was outvoted by darling Megatron’s fusion cannon.”

Rung hadn’t been at this meeting. That wasn’t surprising—it had been a long time since he’d been invited to a _command_ meeting, rather than the standard weekly briefings with all the rest of the department heads. He still had a little influence, though, he was sure. He could ask Megatron if he really thought this was a good idea. If it was really worth the lives of countless innocents to preserve a ‘strategic convenience.’ 

He could already imagine what Megatron would say. The realities of war. That most of the organics would survive if they just stayed out of the way. That there was no price too great for victory.

Rung’s optics drifted down to the datapad. He could almost feel the blink blink blink of the cursor, even with the screen hidden.

“You look stressed,” said Starscream, finishing his first ration. “You should let me detail your face, you’ve got these wear lines in the corners of your mouth. Ghastly.”

Rung ran a self-conscious thumb over his mouth. “If I tell you something, will you keep it to yourself? Really, to yourself?”

Starscream pressed a hand to his chest. “Of course! How could you even _question_ my discretion?”

Rung gave him a flat look, and Starscream relented. “Yes, fine, I’ll keep your secrets. What’s wrong?”

“Say,” said Rung, carefully, “that you found out that a high-ranking officer was… abusing his position. The Decepticon code is clear when it comes to abuses perpetrated against soldiers. But there’s a lot of unstable ground around the subject of prisoner rights. What would be the best way to, to _present_ the evidence and—”

“Is this about Tarn and that little jet?” Starscream started on his second ration.

“Starscream, please,” said Rung, not without a shock of discomfort at his own transparency. “I’m speaking hypothetically.”

“Oh, my mistake,” said Starscream. “Well, _hypothetically_ , Tarn’s spitting mad at you for taking his toy away. He’s even angrier because he knows he should’ve reported the jet as a medic right from the beginning instead of trying to hide his assets. If you go so far as to _report_ his _abuses_ …” Starscream picked up the datapad and glanced over the empty form. “You know you’d have to submit this to Megatron. He’s the only one with any authority over that sanctimonious kiss-aft.”

Rung bit his lip. “Yes, I know.” 

“You’d be declaring war,” said Starscream. “And take it from me—you want to be _certain_ you can win that war before making your move. There’s a reason that I complain to you in private and then duck my helm like a good boy in the command meetings.”

Rung rather doubted that. Starscream had always been a volatile presence in any formal meeting, and Rung had seen him nearly come to blows with Megatron over any number of minor or major strategic decisions. 

“But surely,” said Rung, shaking himself out of his reverie, “surely there wouldn’t be retaliation? I mean, I’d just be following _procedure_. Megatron _wrote_ the code.”

“Yes, he did.” Starscream set down the datapad and picked up his second ration. “Well, I’m sure you know best. Why bother asking a notorious malcontent like me?”

\---

For the next several shift cycles, the atmosphere in Rung’s quarters was charged with something Rung couldn’t quite put his finger on. Not exactly uncomfortable, but not easy either. In the medbay, when Rung was doing small tasks around the edges of the activity, Pharma’s gaze seemed to follow him. He would turn and find Pharma watching him, only for Pharma to jerk his optics away and say nothing, ask for nothing. 

At first it made Rung feel awkward, even guilty. He was still working on the little form with the blinking cursor, and he _knew_ he should talk to Pharma about it, knew that he should have it ready to turn in. Only, he didn’t want to hurt Pharma any more than he already had. Only, he had to phrase the report in exactly the best way to convince what might prove a hostile audience. Only, only, only.

But by the beginning of the third shift cycle, Rung had almost gotten used to the idle stares. They no longer felt hostile or demanding—merely thoughtful, as if Pharma were constantly on the edge of asking a question. One such unremarkable morning, on his way to a conference with the medical lead in fleet division Sigma, Rung dropped Pharma off at the medbay under the competent supervision of Flatline, his head already full of supply train logistics. “Have a nice day,” he said, absently, as the medbay doors buzzed open.

“...You too,” Pharma said. The wave of antiseptic smelling air rushed out, and Pharma stepped inside.

Rung was halfway down the corridor before the reality of what just happened hit him, and he stopped fully in the middle of the floor, antennae twitching with surprise.

\--- 

Pharma brought out his experiments sometimes now, when Rung was reading memos in their room. At first he’d creep over to the washracks with them, spend fifteen minutes doing Primus-knew-what, and then scurry back in and shove them back under his berth. After Rung refrained from commenting one the first, second, third, _and_ fourth incidents, Pharma grew comfortable enough to tinker with his experiments when sitting on his own berth, even allowing Rung a glance or two before putting them away.

He wondered what Pharma was working on. It must mean a lot to him, if he’d hauled the jars through capture and captivity all this time and still furtively worked to keep them away from prying hands. Maybe he was growing symbiotic organisms for nanite repair. There had been research starting into the idea just before the war.

Of course, Rung had already considered, the dirt could simply be a smokescreen. Not many mechs were all that interested in _dirt._ Rung would be hard pressed to think of a safer hiding place. But Pharma was entitled to his secrets, wasn’t he? After all, he had nothing here. And whatever little trinket he might be hiding in those jars certainly wasn’t worth taking away the last thing of his own that Pharma had.

If it was anything useful, anyway, Rung doubted Tarn would have let him take it along.

“Pharma,” he said one night, when the memos were altogether too much and Pharma seemed to be wrapping up whatever he was doing with the jars, “would you like to play a game?”

Pharma’s optics snapped to Rung’s face. “Game?”

“Yes,” said Rung, and got out the little mercantilism board that he’d had made once, long ago, when there were still enough resources that one could just ask for things and probably get them. “I’m missing some of the pieces,” he said, apologetically. “But if you don’t mind pretending that the washers are enforcer markers…?”

Pharma stared at him for a long moment. Then he put his experiments away, under his berth, and straightened up. “No,” he said. “I don’t mind.”

\---

On an unusually quiet day, between patients, Rung dismissed Flatline for the rest of shift with assurances that he and Pharma could certainly handle any walk-in emergencies that might arise by themselves. 

Soon enough they would be awash in casualties shipped in from the nearest battleground, or the next influx of troop refreshments on their way out to the war’s edge, needing viral screens and firewall patches. Better to take the moment of freedom while it lasted. They could all use a break wherever they could get them.

But it did leave Pharma alone in the middle of the bay, with nothing to do, for the first time since Rung had taken him up into his care.

Rung got down a crate of pneumatic gasses and started going through the cans to see what was expired and how badly so. As he went, he glanced from moment to moment at Pharma, across the room. Those two little jars of red dirt sat on the shelf very neatly above Pharma’s usual workstation, frosted glass with the lids of wax paper sealed down by tight golden wire.

He never seemed to open the jars. Lately he seemed occupied with heating them and then letting them cool, sometimes shaking them gently.

Every mech needed a hobby, Rung supposed. Though he still wondered…

“Where did you work,” Pharma asked, suddenly, “before the war?”

Rung paused, and then finished returning the can in his hand to the box. “I had a therapy practice in Rodion,” he said. “What about you?”

“Iacon, of course,” Pharma said, as if anything else was not only unthinkable but borderline insulting. “I had a dozen job offers before I even sat the certification exam. I was Ratchet’s mentee, you know.”

Rung smiled a little at the self-important pomp. “That’s funny,” he said. “It took a war to get a pair of neighbors in the same room.”

“What?” Pharma said. 

“I just mean,” Rung said, absently, “our cities practically joined at the border, and yet the chances that we ever would have met are remarkably slim.”

Pharma frowned. “Why not? We’re both doctors, it’s not so outlandish.”

Rung checked the date stamp on the bottom of a can, then flipped it over in his hand and gave the nozzle a quick press of the thumb. A healthy hiss escaped into the atmosphere.

“An up-and-coming medical genius like you, in the capital of the empire, surrounded by all the right people? And me, out in Rodion, all but blacklisted by the government, unprestigious and…” He smiled to himself. “No, I doubt you would have cared to remember my name.”

“I’m not some ivory tower snob from your two-bit seditious pamphlets,” Pharma said, with an offended little sniff. “I knew people. I did things.”

“Maybe we would have met,” Rung allowed. “You might have pushed me out of your way in a bar. Or referred a patient to me for treatment, when it became clear that whatever else was broken was something you couldn’t fix. But then a colleague of yours would have warned you that I was sticking like black mud on anyone who knew me by then, and there would have been rumors about something unwholesome, and someone would have suggested that you’d be better off looking up Doctor Froid, who did the same thing, but more respectably, of course…”

Pharma bristled. “You’re not the only one who had problems with the old government! You think anyone wanted to let a flier take the surgical certification? I had my own share.”

Rung nodded. “I’m sure you did.”

Pharma glared at him. Rung went back to sorting.

 _“But?”_ Pharma ground out, after a moment.

Rung looked up. “Sorry,” he said, “but, what?”

“You’re sure I did, _but,”_ Pharma prompted. “There’s always a nasty little caveat. You’re sure I did _but_ did fliers really have it so bad, after all, I did get into IU, didn’t I? You’re sure I did _but_ does it really matter what stupid jokes I had to smile at or how many grubby mitts I had to let grope my wings, or, or, how good I had to be every day, how I had to be the _best_ , all the time, every time, no matter what was happening or how unfair it was—”

“I just meant,” Rung said, “that I’m sure you did.”

Pharma stood there, vents steaming, hands flat on the berth in front of him like he’d been a moment from launching himself over it. He looked as if he’d just flown a marathon.

“Are you going to run again?” Rung asked, carefully.

“No,” Pharma snapped.

“I appreciate that,” Rung said.

After a moment, Pharma slumped. He looked down at the berth between his hands.

“For all the good any of that did me anyways,” he muttered. “All that work to end up here, sopping up messes for some hacksaw, like a vacc drone. And when I die in ignominy, no one will even know what happened.”

Rung set aside the crate and came around the slab, to where Pharma was slumped and steaming. Very gently, and with plenty of warning, he reached up and chucked Pharma under the jaw.

“Chin up,” Rung said, “you’re not going to die. You’re just going to work for me for a little while, and then when the war ends, you’ll go home to your friends.”

“The war’s never going to end,” Pharma whispered. He wouldn’t lift his helm to look Rung in the face. “I’m going to die here.”

The miasma of Pharma’s prophecy hung over the medbay for a moment, blotting out the light. There was a terror at the back of Pharma’s optics, not quite numbed over, like something thrashing beyond a pane of ice. Rung set his jaw. He took Pharma’s face in his hands.

“Not if I have anything to say about it,” he replied.

Pharma looked at him at last. The heat pouring from his cheek vents warmed Rung’s fingertips.

“I’m going to get you through this,” Rung said. “And then when the war is over, you can open your own hospital, or teach, or write papers on nanite culture experiments that make Perceptor himself weep in jealousy. And you can forget all about this place, and about me.”

Slowly, like his joints were stopped up with rust, Pharma laid a hand over Rung’s hand on his cheek. 

“I’m not going to forget you,” Pharma said, with such unexpected intensity that for a moment Rung almost believed that he might mean it.

\---

Rung had chosen an odd in-between time to take Pharma to the mess, when a third of the ship was on shift and the other two-thirds were falling asleep or waking up, respectively. It was worth it to see the way Pharma relaxed when the only other mech in the room was an engine tech at a faraway table, nursing warmed coolant and muttering at a datapad.

Rung took a sip of his energon. He quite liked the quiet himself. Maybe he’d adjust his fueling schedule, move a meeting or—

“Do you ever transform?” asked Pharma.

Rung swallowed, almost choked. “Excuse me,” he managed. “That’s a little rude, isn’t it?”

Asking an officer _what he turned into_ was an excellent way to start a fight—even with a mech as notoriously mild as Rung. Though to be fair, he hadn’t _asked_ Starscream to punch the last mech who’d tried to make an issue of it.

He’d started wearing his wheelpack again soon after that incident. Megatron had been very disappointed, and both Starscream and his hapless opponent had spent time in the brig—though the latter had required a long stay in the medbay first. Supervised by Rung, in fact.

It had been nice to believe that his alt mode didn’t matter anymore, in Megatron’s new society. But Rung wasn’t so selfish as to prioritize that fantasy over real mechs being really hurt. Easier to wear the wheelpack and avoid awkward questions.

“I’m only asking,” said Pharma, oblivious to Rung’s uncomfortable reminiscences. “You never transform in our—in your quarters.”

“Neither do you,” said Rung.

“There isn’t room,” said Pharma.

Oh—no, there wasn’t, was there? Was Pharma feeling claustrophobic? That happened sometimes, especially with transport alts. Perhaps Rung could arrange to have someone from the airforce escort Pharma on a flight… Though he doubted Pharma would enjoy that unless there was a way to take along someone he trusted. Maybe—

“But you’re smaller,” pressed Pharma, oddly determined. “You could transform, if you wanted to.” 

“Yes,” admitted Rung. “I don’t often have the desire. My alt mode isn’t what you’d call _useful.”_

He watched Pharma carefully for any reaction, but Pharma seemed… relieved?

“But Ambulon transforms,” he muttered, picking up his cube and swirling it. “And that hack Flatline, he transformed just to go to that ridiculous corridor race during gamma shift.”

Rung stared. He opened his mouth to ask just what, in particular, was so _interesting_ about transforming—

But then a hand landed on his shoulder and Aglet said “room for one more?”

“No,” said Pharma, glaring at Aglet.

“Too bad,” said Aglet, and sat down. “Rung, have you read this memo about rationing pain patches? Can you talk to Megatron, try to get him to—”

“Believe me, I’ve tried,” said Rung with a sigh. “The mechs that were doing medical chip programming had to be evacuated when the Autobots took the third front, and it ‘hasn’t been a priority’ to give them a new base of operations. I told him that if I just had the right equipment _we_ could do it, but—”

He didn’t quite forget Pharma—how could he, with that luminous gaze always fixed on his face? But there wasn’t any reason to bring up their previous conversation, not when there were _logistics_ to deal with.

No doubt Autobots had dozens of lingering Functionist hang-ups. He shouldn’t be surprised that transformation was one of them.

\---

The meeting with Megatron appeared on Rung’s calendar quite unexpectedly during his normal shift. The notification made him jump, and he was briefly grateful that neither Pharma nor any of the other medical staff seemed to be in sight of his open office door.

He read the meeting description carefully, looking for a hint of what event necessitated a meeting that very evening, but under ‘topic’ Megatron had written only _personal._

Well. That took Rung back.

Once, nearer the beginning of the war, Rung had regular blocks of time set aside on his calendar with such vital purposes as ‘fuel with Megatron’ or ‘discuss egalitarian philosophy’ or even ‘stargazing.’ At some point—he didn’t quite remember when—Megatron had grown too busy for such long indulgences. They’d set up a standing energon break instead, first daily, then weekly. When Rung began to be excluded from the command meetings (‘the medical division isn’t concerned with strategy, my dear doctor, there’s no need to waste your time’), it had been natural to give his weekly report as they sat together in Megatron’s office. Weekly fuel breaks gradually became weekly division reports.

When he arrived at Megatron’s office at the end of his shift, Rung wasn’t at all sure what to expect. What he _got,_ once he was buzzed in, was Megatron sitting at his desk, a bottle of highgrade in his hands and two gracefully curved glasses set in front of him.

Surprised, Rung inched closer. “I don’t suppose one of those is for me?” he said.

“I should hope it is,” Megatron said, and held the bottle up to the light, as if observing it for the first time. “Vosnian vintage, lithium-ion. A preference of yours, if I remember correctly?”

“You do,” Rung said, and took up his usual seat on the edge of the desk, accepting the bottle when Megatron offered it to him. He flipped it over and scanned the packaging. “Megatron, this is—where did you even _get_ this?”

Megatron plucked it from his fingers. “Recovered from the cellar of a Senator’s summer home,” he said. “One of the scavenging teams shipped it back a vorn or two ago. I thought we might enjoy it together.”

“I shouldn’t…” Rung said, though he couldn’t help but watch as Megatron poured himself a glass, “I’ve got Pha—that is, the Autobot prisoner is in my personal custody, and he—”

Megatron hummed as he poured the second glass despite Rung’s protestations. “And how _is_ Pharma?”

Rung lost track of whatever excuse he’d been about to give. Somehow, the fact that Megatron knew Pharma’s name startled him. He _shouldn’t_ be startled. Megatron knew everyone’s names, even the grunts. It was one of the things Rung had always loved about him.

“Oh,” he said, and shook himself. “He’s doing well.”

“Good,” Megatron said. “I would hate to think he was giving you any trouble, after the endless tepid slog of discontent Tarn’s been putting me through.”

“I,” Rung said. “Yes. Thank you.”

Megatron offered him a glass of shining lavender fuel. When Rung didn’t reach for it, Megatron pushed it into his hands instead. 

“Just have a glass,” Megatron said softly. “I’m afraid neither of us can afford to properly scramble our processors these days, but have a glass with me all the same. We have to take these momentary pleasures where we can find them.”

“True,” Rung said, and allowed himself a sip. It fizzled over his tongue, the flavor at once familiar and wonderfully sharp.

“It occurs to me that lately I haven’t been allowing myself enough time to simply enjoy what I have,” Megatron said. He poured himself a matching glass. “What is the point of all the conquests in the cosmos, if one never takes the time to open a bottle of Vosnian Lithium with a beautiful mech?” 

Heat flushed Rung’s fuel lines. Of all the lovers he’d known, Megatron was still the only one who ever had called him beautiful. 

Megatron lifted his glass. “To our many victories,” he said. “And their many rewards.”

“To peace,” Rung agreed, and drank with Megatron.

Sweet and bitter and electric, Megatron’s scavenged treasure went down like twilight on the tongue. 

Megatron lifted his hand and let it cup the curve of Rung’s hip, stroking his thumb over the seams there absently. The effect was that, although Rung was sitting a bit to his left, there was now Megatron on both sides of him, almost like an embrace.

A whimsical longing struck Rung. Setting one hand on Megatron’s broad shoulder, he lowered himself off the edge of the desk and into Megatron’s warm and thrumming lap. Knees first, and then he let his legs slip out from under him. The drink in his other hand jostled a bit, splashing drops over the edge, down his hand. Once he was neatly settled he took a moment to lick the fizzling liquid off his fingers.

Megatron was watching him, keenly enough, but with a lazy, patient air. Rung grinned at him. Megatron’s body was so familiar, as if Rung had never left it—the exact timbre of his engine, the EM field, the heat. A strange melancholy shuddered his engine, but he shook it off again, in favor of another shimmering lavender sip.

“Do you remember when I used to write you letters?” Megatron asked, his voice rumbling through his frame.

Rung smiled wistfully. “Back when I was in Rodion, you mean?”

“Sneaking revolutionaries out of the city by cover of night,” Megatron said. “My mech among the multitudes… yes, you were an excellent spy.”

“Hardly a spy,” Rung demurred, with some discomfort. 

“Certainly a useful agent, at least,” Megatron replied.

Rung skipped back in memory to those uncertain days, the coded missives, the close calls, the hidden rooms in which he’d kept dissidents and radicals hidden from the enforcers. Of course, he’d only been a psychiatrist back then. Unremarkable. Little noticed.

And then the war had come to Rodion at last, and Megatron had arrived one fire-licked morning, black as smoke and covered in scorch marks, hand outstretched beneath the whine of incoming jets, to take Rung away.

“How we used to write,” Megatron mused. “I remember once I wrote to you of theater, by the light of a blazing construct facility…”

“I always wanted to take you to see a show,” Rung said. He sighed. “It seems now like we’ll never have the chance.”

“Have faith,” Megatron said. “Someday when our banner flies over the galaxy, there will be time enough for all the works of days and hands.”

It was _the galaxy_ now, Rung noticed, not _the planet._ But Megatron had always been a big dreamer. When he’d written Rung in those early days, he’d promised uncompromising freedom—a life without Functionism, without limits, without cares. He’d told Rung that even a so-called mistake of nature, an unwanted outlier, deserved respect. And he’d meant it. Anything was possible, to Megatron.

Megatron had dreamed of justice too, and Rung had allowed himself to dream that same impossible dream. In the face of every dire stratagem, every necessary violence, Rung had believed that they were doing the most possible good for the greatest amount of people. He wanted to believe this army, for all its rough edges and sometimes brutality, was still an army that cared about justice.

Justice. Oh, he’d avoided this conversation for too long.

“...Listen,” Rung said, “about Tarn… Pharma’s displayed some really worrying—”

“You said Pharma was doing fine,” Megatron said, raising a brow. 

“Well,” Rung said, caught short. “He—yes. As much as can be expected, it’s only—what Tarn did to—”

“If he’s _not_ doing fine under your care, I can always have him removed again. Perhaps to a POW facility. That’s really where he should be, you know.” Megatron rolled the fuel glass in his hand, stirring up sparks in the liquid. “You _do_ know, don’t you?”

Rung swallowed, but despite the high grade, his mouth was dry. “Yes,” he said. 

“I knew you would,” Megatron murmured. Then he lifted his hand to Rung’s cheek and gently—but inarguably—guided Rung up to him.

Megatron tasted of bittersweet engex and half-tempered steel. Rung froze under the relentless press of his mouth.

When Megatron pulled back, his optics were gleaming. As ever, in their depths Rung saw the fury of a titan leashed beneath a terrible will, and for a moment, all of it was fixed only on him. For the first time, Rung felt uneasy beneath the force of it. 

“A better drink than all the engex in all the world,” Megatron said, running his thumb along Rung’s lips. 

“I don’t know,” Rung replied, aiming for humor, “this one is pretty good.”

“And how wonderfully it pairs with you,” Megatron said. He leaned down again, cupping Rung’s helm in his broad black palm, and pressed his lips to Rung’s cheekguard, audial, antennae. A little shiver ran down Rung’s back, at the brush of lips against the delicate length of his antenna. When the little thing tried to twitch, Megatron caught it between his dentae and sucked. Rung let out a shaky moan.

Megatron’s other hand, stroking absently at the curve of a hip, started to stray down into Rung’s lap, following the seam of metal there. 

It had been a long time since he had touched Rung this way. The years crashed over Rung, all at once, excruciating in their weight. He pressed up into Megatron, almost frantic not to be forgotten again, discarded, set aside for another vorn of disuse. 

“Megatron,” he panted. “Megatron—”

Megatron kissed him again, deeper now, licking the words from Rung’s mouth. When he withdrew, he left his fingers pressed firmly over Rung’s lips.

“Hush, no need to say anything,” murmured Megatron. He stood, picking Rung up in his arms and laying him out on the desk. Rung’s wheelpack dug into his back—he squirmed, trying to get comfortable as Megatron took each of his thighs in his massive hands and spread them apart. “Just lie back and let me take care of everything.”

Looking down the barrel of his own open thighs, Rung was struck again by the deep red gleam of Megatron’s gaze. Was it passion there, that had him burning so? In his casually implacable grip, Rung couldn’t have closed his legs if he had wanted to.

Megatron bent forward and licked a hot, slow line over Rung’s modesty panel. Reflexively, Rung cycled down tight and empty, interface protocols onlining all at once. Megatron smirked at the sudden flush of heat under his open mouthed kisses.

Megatron released Rung’s right thigh only after pushing it back out of the way, bending it back nearly to the curve of Rung’s chest plates. He took Rung’s hand and moved it to close around his own thigh, leaving Rung to hold himself open while Megatron refixed his attention on the modesty panel still faintly glittering with wet kiss marks. 

He flicked loose the clasps with practiced ease. Then the huge hand fitted over Rung’s panel and pulled it off with one clean swipe, tossing it aside to clatter forgotten on the floor.

“There it is,” Megatron purred, taking in the sight of Rung’s warm little valve with obvious, hungry pleasure. Rung fidgeted under the scrutiny, his fingers flexing where he still held his thigh.

Megatron pushed his fingers through the valve lips, reveling in the clench of mechanisms and the wet slide of just-gathering lubricant. 

“Aren’t you lovely,” Megatron said. “And all for me.”

When Megatron was buried as deeply in Rung as the capacity of his frame could take, Megatron dropped to his forearms on the desk, caging Rung with dark, thrumming metal. Rung felt another pang of unease, a sense of helplessness—but that was foolish, of course Megatron would never do anything to hurt him. And it felt _good,_ the way Megatron’s thick utilitarian spike lit up every one of his nodes as it slid inside of him. Rung had missed this, he had.

Rung skidded a little on the desk as Megatron increased the pace, and the press of his wheelpack against his armor grew from merely uncomfortable to mildly painful. “Megatron,” he said, “can I—Can you—”

“Shh,” said Megatron, one hand drifting down to toy with Rung’s half-pressurized spike. “I have you.”


	4. Red In The Morning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rung shook his helm. “Stop throwing my own words at me. Just stop, all right?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains messy/unnegotiated relationship dynamics. It also contains a dream sequence including unwanted sex, internalized victim shaming, and brief body horror.

Rung’s valve ached a little as he let himself into his quarters. It wasn’t an entirely unpleasant ache—once he would have worn it with an air of pride, a mark of an evening well spent. But tonight had left him feeling oddly… empty. Like he’d been hollowed out and then left to pull the shell of himself back together and become a presentable working mechanism again.

He was tired, that was all. It had been a long time. He ought to stretch, really, try to relax his strained tensors, but he’d rather recharge. He slipped into his room, his sole intention to get to his berth as quietly as possible so as not to disturb Pharma.

That plan quickly became untenable. The lights were still on, and Pharma was sitting bolt upright on his own berth, staring at the door.

“Where have you been?” he demanded.

“Hello,” said Rung, letting the door close behind him. “You didn’t need to wait up for me. I know you have your shift in a few hours.”

“So do you,” said Pharma. His optics scanned Rung from helm to foot, lingering on his thighs. “Are those _scuff marks?”_

“Yes, we _both_ have a shift in a few hours,” said Rung. “So I’ll just dim the lights and—”

Pharma surged up from the berth. “Who was it?”

“I don’t think that’s any of your business,” said Rung, but Pharma’s hands were already on him, examining every scuff and scrape and paint transfer. He had plenty to choose from. They hadn’t been especially careful.

Rung weighed the odds of being allowed to go to bed without an interrogation and decided it would be better to just get it over with. “I had a meeting with Megatron,” he said.

“Megatron?” Pharma’s voice reached a staticky pitch that Starscream would’ve envied. He looked, if anything, even more furious. “If that butcher—”

“Pharma, please.” Rung flapped his hands, trying to convey that his walls were not as sound-proof as he would like. “I’m sorry you had to find out like this, but Megatron and I are—” what _were_ they? Oh, damn. “—an item.”

Pharma frowned. “No, you’re not.”

“Excuse me?” Rung reset his audials. “I think I would know best whether—”

“You used to be, but you’re not,” said Pharma. “Flatline told me while you were in that supply meeting. He said that being a Decepticon medic used to be a better gig when you had more power, before Megatron stopped thinking so much with his spike.”

Rung’s mouth thinned. “Well. I’ll have to have a talk with Flatline. He doesn’t have any right to be spreading gossip and misinformation about my private life.” Annoyance made him try to shove past Pharma. Pharma, however, didn’t take the hint - he simply stood there as Rung pressed against him, his hand reaching out to trace a dent on Rung’s hip where Megatron’s thumb had dug in, just a little. It hadn’t hurt much at the time, but it ached now and Rung swatted Pharma’s hand away.

“I can pull those dents out in less than a minute,” said Pharma, softly.

The phrasing rang a bell, and Rung let his processor pull up the relevant file. Then he flinched and scowled. “I’m _fine.”_ he said. “This isn’t at all the same as T—Megatron cares for me.”

“I’m sure he does,” said Pharma, in a tone that was not at all convinced.

“We had a few centuries of falling out,” conceded Rung. “I haven’t always agreed with his decisions. But we’re getting along better now that—” Now that I owe him something, said his untrustworthy processor, and Rung cut himself off.

“I’m the one who climbed into his lap,” he said, instead. “He’s the one who kissed me, but. I missed being in his lap.”

“He’s the supreme general of the entire army and the commander of the ship you live on,” said Pharma. “Some might argue that any consent under these—”

Rung shook his helm. “Stop throwing my own words at me. Just stop, all right?”

Pharma looked at him for a long moment, his optics dark and unreadable. Then he cupped Rung’s helm in both hands and kissed him.

Rung didn’t know why he kissed back. 

“You taste like steel,” said Pharma, his lips moving against Rung’s. “Is that him? Do you taste like him?”

Rung felt like he was going to fall over. He clutched at Pharma’s wrists. “Pharma, I don’t—”

Pharma bit Rung’s lip, hard enough to split the soft metal. His tongue slid across the swell of energon, then shoved into Rung’s mouth.

Rung’s knees buckled, and he _would_ have fallen, except Pharma was already lifting him, spinning him, setting him on his own berth.

“I’m going to make you forget him,” mumbled Pharma, in between kisses. “You’re not his, not really, not like you’re _mine._ I’ll do anything for you, just let me—” His hand scrabbled at Rung’s modesty panel. “Let me—”

“Don’t,” said Rung. His hand covered Pharma’s, where his fingers had finally found the release. “Pharma.”

Pharma snatched his hand back. “No?” His optics looked wild, betrayed—nothing at all like the last time Rung had rejected him, when there had only been fear and resentment.

“I’m sore,” said Rung, instead of any of the things he should say, about prisoner’s rights and consent and not soliciting sex from your immediate supervisor who you happened to live with.

Pharma blazed. “I’ll kill him,” he said. “Can I still kiss you? I want to kiss you.”

“Yes,” whispered Rung. And then, more strongly, “don’t make threats like that. I know you don’t mean them.”

Pharma, mouth already pressed to Rung’s neck, didn’t answer.

\---

When Rung woke the next morning, it was to a universe that felt somehow disconnected from the roiling exhaustion in his spark. Everything felt a little unreal, and he wondered to himself if all that had really happened—if he’d really shared a kiss with Pharma, shared a _desk_ with Megatron. Though he knew his own memory files and could count the scrapes on his frame, that uncertainty persisted until the end of his shift, when Megatron—

But let us set Rung aside for the moment and turn our attention to Pharma. 

There he lies, curled tightly into the best approximation of a ball that his berth and his joints will allow. His wings twitch occasionally with the rigors of a dream-filled recharge. He was lulled into the depths of defragmentation by the emptiness of the room and the grudgingly-accepted security of the locked door. He doesn’t allow himself to dream when Rung is present, but now…

Cybertronians differ from organic lifeforms in many ways, some more obvious than others. One commonality shared across the barriers of metal and flesh, however, is the ability to dream. The psychological underpinnings of sleeping minds shuffle and sort experiences for storage into long-term memory, help dreamers make sense of their lives, and, surprisingly often, give Rung nightmares about trying to help a patient fill out one of the old unending Functionist frame classification forms.

In this dream, Pharma strains to spread his legs wider, even as his spark contracts at the prospect of what is about to happen to him. The prospect of what he’s asking for. The great gray hulk standing at the end of the berth grunts at the sight of Pharma’s uncovered valve.

“Autobot filth,” the hulk grumbles in its thick miner’s accent. “I won’t touch it.”

“No, please,” says Pharma, hating the sound of his own voice. “Please, I—I would be _honored.”_

The hulk grunts again. Its optics are lingering on Pharma’s spike housing, and Pharma tries and fails to force his spike to pressurize. The discomfort must show on his face—the hulk grins, suddenly, as if it wants to know how much Pharma hates it.

He does hate it. He doesn’t want to be touched, he’s _never_ wanted to be touched, only—

“There’s no need for all this, darling,” Rung interrupts. “If Megatron wants me, he can have me.” He’s sitting next to Pharma’s helm, and despite his best efforts to hide it, Pharma can hear the terrified waver in his voice. The gray hulk’s helm lifts, its optics focus on Rung’s pretty face, and Pharma feels like his spark is going to extinguish here and now.

“No!” he says, too loud. The gray hulk’s helm snaps back to stare at him with more aggression than attraction. “No, I mean—I mean, you can’t keep the mighty Decepticon warlord all to yourself, can you? Please, please allow a humble captive to serve in the only way he can—”

“Shut up,” says the hulk, and Pharma’s vocalizer dies. The dream shifts around him, leaving him dizzy and disoriented. His legs are held open by larger hands now, his valve is full. The gray hulk is moving between his thighs, deep punishing thrusts, and Pharma’s helm jostles against Rung’s hip.

Raw, physical arousal coils around his circuitry like a horrible infection. He bites his lip and looks up into Rung’s impassive face.

“It’s all right,” Pharma whispers. “It’s all right, he can use me, I don’t mind. As long as _you’re_ kept safe. There’s nothing left of me to hurt. I’ve already been ruined.”

The gray hulk roars out its pleasure, its hips jerking forward in the spasmodic rhythm of something dying. Pharma looks at it and regrets it; the hulk is wearing a purple mask, and the harmonics of its voice catch and tear at Pharma’s spark. His circuitry surges with charge, and Pharma’s valve contracts sickeningly as he overloads.

He feels nauseous, but he can’t, he can’t—he looks back up at Rung, one hand coming up to grip tightly at Rung’s wrist. “Please,” he grits out. “Please tell me this is good. Please tell me this is enough. Please—”

Rung opens his mouth to speak but rust spills out in a fine dust instead, clogging Pharma’s mouth and optics and vents. Pharma screams, and the hulk between his legs laughs and thrusts harder.

“What’s happening?” asks Rung. His voice is a mess of static—Pharma cycles his optics hard and manages to regain vision just in time to watch rust eat away at one of Rung’s arms, reddish contagion climbing up over his elbow until his shoulder also crumbles into dust.

“No,” Pharma gasps. “No, no, no—”

“Did you do this to me?” says Rung. He reaches out and lays his remaining hand on Pharma’s cheek. “Is this because of you? Pharma?”

“No!” shrieks Pharma. “No! I’m saving you! _Please—”_

It doesn’t matter what he says. The hulk shoves into him again, and when Pharma is jostled into Rung this time, Rung gives a weak sigh and collapses over him, every sturdy metal part of his frame dissolving at once. His awful remains bloom and bury Pharma in dunes of fine red dust—Pharma can feel it seeping into his seams, the infection taking root, and still the hulk is thrusting—

The door pings, and Pharma’s optics online so fast and so bright that it takes him several long seconds to distinguish anything at all beyond the flare of light. He’s lying safe in his berth, in Rung’s room. Alone. Untouched.

His panel is shut, but his thighs are wet with lubricant that’s seeped through the seams. Pharma gropes for his tarp to scrub it off, taking deep vents to calm the racing of his engine. Once his thighs are as clean as they’ll get, he yanks the little box out from under his berth and stares at the two jars inside. They’re still secure. He’d know if they’d been tampered with.

The door pings again, followed by an insistent knocking. Pharma shoves the box back under his berth and gets to his feet.

\---

Starscream pinged the door a second time, then rapped on it with his knuckles. “Finally,” he snapped, when it began to slide open. “I’m not used to waiting around for—”

“Rung’s not here,” said the ragged little Autobot who’d somehow weaseled his way into Rung’s quarters with nothing more than a pair of unfashionably broad wings and a flimsy sob story. He’d only opened the door a crack, but Starscream could see he looked exhausted.

Starscream inserted his hand into the crack, claws fully extended in case Pharma decided to make something of it. There was a moment when Starscream thought perhaps… But no, Pharma only stepped back and watched sullenly as Starscream pried the door open. 

Rung was not, in fact, there. Starscream scowled at the empty room. “It’s his off-shift,” he complained.

The door slid closed again behind him. Pharma watched him from where he was leaning against a wall, casual as if he wasn’t just trying to hide his wings from any potential damage. Starscream let his own wings flare a little wider, taking up more space.

“He’s probably in the mess hall,” said Pharma.

“He’s _not,”_ said Starscream. He’d sat at Rung’s favorite table for the better part of an hour, reading the same stultifying report and making his ration last as long as possible so he wouldn’t look pathetic. They’d made plans—or, not _plans,_ but Starscream always sat and gossiped with Rung this time of week, surely Rung realized it by now. 

“Then he’s with Megatron,” said Pharma, the flatness of his voice not quite hiding the loathing with which he said Megatron’s name. Well. A mech of taste, then. “They’re an _item._ Rung told me.”

Starscream turned to Rung’s little shelf of trinkets and pretended he was contemplating them. If Pharma had thought he’d shock Starscream with gossip, he was wrong. Starscream had known something was different—Megatron became even more intolerable when he was fragging someone, all loose and easy confidence, leaning back in his chair on the command deck and grinning as he ordered another bomb strike on an Autobot outpost. Starscream had thought maybe he’d picked a new fleeting favorite from the troops—but of course it was Rung, it was always just Rung.

He’d tried pinging Rung’s comm, back in the mess. No wonder Rung hadn’t answered.

Starscream picked up one of Rung’s delicate little models. He remembered serving on this ship, what was its name…

“Don’t touch that,” snapped Pharma.

“Excuse me?” Starscream turned back, the model cradled in his hand.

“I said, don’t touch it,” said Pharma. Oh, he was literally shaking, how darling. How long had he been winding himself up over there, too afraid to tell the big bad Decepticon intruder to get out of his hab? “Rung doesn’t like it when people touch his things.”

“Hmm.” Starscream prowled a few steps forward. Pharma flinched at every click of his thrusters, but his optics stayed bright and defiant. Interesting. “No, he doesn’t, does he?”

Starscream reached out and caught Pharma’s chin between thumb and forefinger, tilting it and making sure Pharma could feel the threat of his claws. “But sometimes he shares,” he murmured into Pharma’s audial. “As long as it’s someone he trusts to be… careful.”

Pharma shoved him hard enough that Starscream actually stumbled back a step. There was a clicking whir as Pharma’s hand transformed, and suddenly the light glinted on a razor-sharp scalpel. 

“Watch it,” spat Starscream, checking his chest plate for scratches. “Assaulting a Decepticon officer would sign your death warrant. And put that thing away. You think you could hurt a _warframe_ with that little toy?”

Pharma bristled. “I could carve you bare to your struts!” he snarled. “Get out, _now,_ and I won’t tell Rung that you came here and tried to—”

“What, make conversation?” Starscream tsked to himself. “You’re too sure of yourself. A little scrap of metal surrounded by sharkticons. You think Megatron wouldn’t hesitate to execute you, if you step an inch out of line? You think he won’t give you back to Tarn, if he thinks you’re distracting Rung from his duties?”

He’d meant to remind Pharma of his place, but if anything Pharma stood a little taller, his wings raised high and his optics burning with hate. “Rung would protect me,” he said.

“Hmm.” Starscream went back to the shelf and deposited the little model there, whole and unharmed. A neat little collection of sentimental junk. He’d given Rung a few of them, and he recognized some of Deadlock’s souvenirs. Rung did like to cultivate dangerous mechs, though he never seemed to realize it. Starscream wondered where he kept Megatron’s gifts.

“It’s seductive, isn’t it?” said Starscream, addressing the shelf. “Thinking that someone might care. That you’ll find solace in him, that you’ll be taken in and healed. But Rung’s always orbited Megatron like a little sun being slowly sucked into a black hole. Someday Megatron will take you away, like he’s taken half of the medical division—for war, for experiments, for his own secret purposes. And Rung will probably cry for you, but he won’t _do_ anything about it.”

“You’re wrong,” said Pharma. In that moment he didn’t look anything like the cringing ghost of a mech that Starscream had half-dragged into the air force barracks. There was an incandescence to him that couldn’t quite be extinguished. 

“I would like to be,” said Starscream. His clawtip traced the hull of a model ship, shifting dust from its silvery arc.

He turned away from the shelf. “Tell him I was looking for him when he gets back, won’t you?”

Pharma didn’t say anything as Starscream walked out, but his scalpel gleamed. Starscream made a point not to hurry.

\---

Rung was nearly offline before his body hit the berth, the struggle to climb up over the edge more difficult than he remembered it being, normally. Megatron had gone on for a long time that evening, playing with the responses of Rung’s system, dragging it out like he hadn’t for millenia. As if all of it was new again, as if every whimper delighted him equally. It should have been flattering, and it _was,_ but—

Those smoldering optics looking down at him had felt, for a moment, more like the sights of a rifle than the warmth of a lover.

Rung onlined one optic as a dim clatter roused him from that exhausted twilight. The bolts of the berth frame gave a pitiful squeak under the weight of a second whole mech, much more substantial than Rung. Pharma laid down beside Rung, hands reaching. He pulled Rung tight against him, into his grasping arms, and curled his legs up around Rung’s legs. 

Rung moaned, mostly in bleary confusion, as Pharma’s hands grabbed and smoothed and squeezed at every inch of him, as if frantic to map all of it beneath his fingers. His mouth pressed equally frantic kisses to Rung’s chin and neck and helm.

“Pharma…” Rung said, “what…? This berth is too small…”

“It’s fine,” Pharma muttered between kisses, “I fit just fine like this, see?”

Rung did not at all believe that Pharma’s wings could fit on this berth, but he didn’t have much of a chance to say so, as Pharma picked that point in the conversation to coax Rung into opening his mouth with deep, messy urgency.

“This is where you belong,” Pharma told him, somewhere in all of it, “with me, just like this.”

Rung made a vague noise of acknowledgement. It _was_ nice. Maybe he did belong here.

Pharma squeezed him in tight, wrapping him up in a crisscross of arms that felt more secure than anything Rung had known in a long, long time. It was warm in the airy tide of his vents. Pharma tucked Rung underneath his chin. 

“Let’s run,” Pharma said. “You and I, we could get away from here. Be free. See a sunset again through the atmosphere over a city. And no one would hurt us, or make us hurt each other.” 

The cables of Pharma’s throat, fuzzy in Rung’s vision, were tight and strained. There was a tiny imperfection in the seam of his pauldron, like he’d welded it back together all by himself at some point. He had been so alone, hadn’t he.

“I could get us out of here,” Pharma said, more urgently. “I have—I can make sure no one would chase us. We could go. Rung, we could go. Don’t you want to go with me?”

It was a lovely dream—the sky pink and yellow over the spires of a world with no war, the impossible sweetness of fresh air, maybe a little too cold, but Pharma warm against him underneath the great changing globe of the sky. 

“I can’t,” Rung said, and his spark twisted—ached—still caught in the lovely dream. He longed to be anywhere that wasn’t the endless utilitarian corridors of a ship, suspended in the unchanging void, with nothing but the slow dying whine of his own conscience.

“Why not?” Pharma demanded.

Rung was tired, and the answer was so heavy. It was Megatron’s hand against his cheek. It was the bombs that had come down on Rodion, black smoke plumes, while he watched from the door of a rising transport. It was the endless dead, the still living, the soon-to-die.

“They need me here,” Rung murmured, at last, with his face buried in Pharma’s collar. “Ambulon, and Aglet, and Megatron, and everyone. Like you needed me.”

Pharma was quiet for a moment. His hand cupped the back of Rung’s head, as if they were crashing, and Pharma could only try to minimize the impact. 

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

Rung lay there, half in sleep and half out, warm and sad and too afraid of answers to ask the questions he should, cradled in the frame of someone who loved him, maybe.

\---

Everyone in medical knew that there was a pattern to the medics’ shift schedule. If you had a good manner with the patients, if you didn’t have time for typical Decepticon posturing, and, crucially, if you agreed with Rung’s basic principle of ‘do no harm’ or at least ‘do _minimal_ harm, I know we’re at war but _really’—_ well, then you would be on beta shift, when Rung was the supervising officer. Otherwise you were on alpha shift with Aglet, or gamma shift with Hook.

Aglet got the medics who were a little too practical for Rung’s taste. He didn’t know exactly what the criteria was for Hook, but he suspected it had something to do with Hook’s more hands-on approach to personnel management and his take-no-prisoners mentality when it came to supply theft.

Shift assignment had no real effect on a medic’s career—Rung never would’ve dreamed of playing favorites. Aglet wasn’t even sure if Rung was aware that he was _doing_ it, in this small way, surrounding himself with the kinds of medics who were nice to nurses. But it meant that when Aglet went into the mess to get his ration after his before-shift therapy sessions, he always found a little table packed with the other early riser medics from alpha shift, squeezed up against the beta shift medics taking their second ration before heading off to recharge.

Aglet waved at them as he walked in, but Flatline stood up and leaned over the top of the table. “Hey!” he shouted, “Fingers! Get your aft over here!”

Aglet paused in between the rows, glancing bemusedly from the table full of medics to the mass of mechs standing in some approximation of a line at the far end of the hall, where the dispensers were protected from the rest of the room by blast-proof partitions. 

“Come on,” Flatline said, impatiently, “don’t bother with the line, there’s enough at the table for you.”

Aglet relaxed, and then made his way through the rows to grab a seat across from Ambulon, who held out a spare cube absently as he continued scrolling through the science division reports on the clunky personal datapad he’d fixed up for himself centuries ago.

Aglet politely didn’t comment on the illicit presence of a spare cube. As usual, they all pretended that nothing was signified by anything, and all things were arbitrary good fortune. Aglet took a sip.

“Long wait for rations,” he observed.

“Someone jammed a stint into one of the dispensers,” Flatline told him. “Guess they were trying to get more than their fair share out, but now there’s a plug of melted lead stuck in the damn thing and they’re still waiting on maintenance. Primus, I hate it when Soundwave’s off base. This whole place always goes to slag.”

Aglet grimaced. “You’d think they’d know better, with Tarn hanging around waiting for his next assignment. Tampering with the dispenser could easily be a List offense, the way things have been going.”

Flatline made a noise of disgust. Wordless, which was good. More easily deniable. Nevertheless, the two medics from Aglet’s shift—Buildup and Comeback—gave Flatline and Aglet a look and then shifted slightly in their seats to angle away from the conversation. Frag, Aglet usually knew better than to get political.

“You’re late today,” Ambulon joined in, without looking up. “Iacon’s Finest giving you trouble?”

“Thought you couldn’t get the glitch to talk,” Flatline said. “What’s he doing, aggressive pantomime?”

“Well, he’s started talking,” Aglet said, with wry irony. “The problem now is getting him to stop. Or make sense.”

Even now, the uncomfortable memory of their last session lingered, like the tang of rust on the back of the glossa. Pharma’s manic verbal circling, full of morbid imagery and confused fantasy, and Rung—always Rung—staked through the center of the storm. The only time he stopped his endless gyre was to wait on some answer to a question he had asked, and usually about Rung. He was perpetually unsatisfied with Aglet’s placating answers.

“Just give him a good hard shake,” Flatline said. “That’ll set a mech straight.” He gave a pointed gesture with his cube, then slurped down the muddy dregs.

“I can’t believe you’re a surgeon,” Ambulon commented. 

“I can’t believe someone hasn’t shot you out of a cannon,” Flatline said, rounding on him. “Watch your mouth or _I_ just might do it.”

“Nobody’s shooting anybody out of a cannon,” Aglet said. “Come on. You want to go another round with Rung’s ‘I’m not mad I’m just disappointed’ face?”

They all exchanged similar looks of aggrieved familiarity. 

“Don’t see why we can’t do a _little_ firing mechs out of cannons,” Flatline said. “Doesn’t have to be Ambulon. I’ll gladly load Astrotrain up the barrel, if you mechs will hit the big red button.”

“Hit it yourself,” Ambulon said. _“I’m_ not fragging about with triplechangers.”

“Moonheart would’ve done it,” Flatline grumbled. “Hell of a medic, Moonheart. Primus rest the metal.”

There was a rattle as Buildup and Comeback got up from the table. “Gotta go to shift,” said Comeback.

“We’ve still got twenty kliks,” said Aglet.

“Yeah, well,” said Comeback. “No sense hanging around.” He tugged Buildup away by his wrist.

“Fraggers,” said Flatline, when they weren’t quite out of audial range. “Talking about the fallen isn’t _treason.”_

“We don’t know Moonheart’s dead,” said Ambulon. “Just because she was assigned to Shockwave—”

Aglet was ignoring them, optics following Comeback and Buildup’s path out of the mess hall. They might be an issue. Aglet’s position depended on Rung, but Rung in turn depended on Aglet not to cause problems. If a couple of Aglet’s medics went telling tales of discontent and stolen rations...

Flatline elbowed him. “What do you think, Fingers? Any chance of Moonheart strolling back out of science division after a couple hundred years, all smiles?”

“Don’t be a glitch,” said Aglet. He glanced back at Ambulon, who was looking flat in the way that suggested he was holding back something painful. “I mean—”

Faintly, he heard a yelp. The panels of his radar dishes fluffed and flared, and Aglet’s helm turned as he oriented on Pharma, who was standing in the mess hall entry, recoiling from the four-wheeler who’d just shoved past him. Aglet tried to spot Pharma’s escort and caught sight of Dirge, already halfway to the ration line without a glance back to the mech he was supposed to be watching.

Ambulon sighed and pushed himself up from the table. “I’ll get him,” he said. He went off, waving to Pharma as the jet stood and sneered at the crowd of the mess hall in general. There was the littlest flick of wing, and then Pharma relaxed by the tiniest margin when Ambulon caught up to him.

Good. Something about the way Pharma looked at that four-wheeler… It hadn’t looked scared. It had looked like he was just barely restraining himself from violence.

There was a lot of blood in Pharma’s dreams. Blood and rust and _Rung._ Maybe Aglet should say something. Nothing that would break confidentiality, but—

Flatline turned back to their table. “So,” he said, “heard there’s a certain killsquad inbound for repairs tomorrow. You gonna miss movie night again?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Aglet, stiffly. “And I’m not going to movie night, you’ve only _got_ one movie, and I’m sick of it.”

“ _Too Quick, Too Querulous_ is a cinematic masterpiece, and I don’t see you offering any media downloads of your own,” said Flatline. “And nice excuse. We all know you’re gonna be—”

Pharma arrived just in time to witness Flatline’s crude gesture. _“Well,”_ he said. “How nice to be among my peers.”

\---

Rung had long since memorized the squadron number Deadlock was assigned to. 

Notifications came through to him, directly, every time a squad was inbound through the flagship. Usually they were routed through here for medical overhaul, or a change of commander, or because they had been so decimated that now their remaining numbers needed to be split up and divided between the infinite short-handed legions that remained. There were a few patients Rung always awaited the number of with equal worry and anticipation—whose squad number could herald either a welcome reunion or a terrible loss. His friends were fewer than they had been, once.

Rung waited in the hall beyond the loading bay, fingers folded tight and squeezing occasionally in front of him as he waited for the soldiers to pour out. 

A rotary with a propeller blown off at the joint; two genericons holding a third by the shoulders, whose legs had been detached and discarded with the clean efficiency of a field medic; several hulking hauler types; and finally, _finally_ soot-stained white armor.

As Deadlock ducked into the corridor, his optics found Rung. He didn’t smile, because he never smiled, unless it was a threat. His demeanor didn’t warm up particularly, either. But then, Rung didn’t expect it to.

“Hey Doc,” said the gunner.

“Welcome back,” said Rung, and nodded in the direction of the hall, “want to take a walk?”

It was a reassuring familiarity to fall into step again. He and Deadlock had been there nearly from the start, in the wild, uncertain pandemonium when no one knew what was happening and the only solid thing in the world was Megatron, a proud steel monolith amid the raging fires. They probably seemed an unlikely pair: Rung, who was too soft, and Deadlock, notoriously hard. 

But they were both outliers in their ways. Rung, because he never could quite meet that Decepticon ideal. Deadlock, because his hard-edged, selfless brutality unnerved even the bruisers who should have been his peers. And in Deadlock, Rung had found a core of fierce principle, a desperate light—while in Rung, Deadlock had found… he had found…

Well, _something_ presumably. Perhaps a friendly face, waiting at the spacedock.

They did actually meet before Megatron, although Deadlock wouldn’t remember it—long term circuit speeder abuse did that to a mech. It had been in Rodion, when Deadlock had been a street mech and Rung had been more _traditionally_ employed. On a walk home through the city one unremarkable evening, the poor thing had come stumbling out of an alley, high out of his mind, grabbed Rung by the shoulders and pronounced quite emphatically that Rung was God, and then offered him ten percent off a blowjob in recognition of this.

He suspected it was better for everyone if he was the only one who remembered the event. Fortunately Deadlock hadn’t been anywhere near as formidable back then, and reacted very graciously if somewhat incoherently to being turned down.

They walked quietly for a while, drifting further and further away from the hub of activity, towards the engine rooms. They both had clearance; on a Decepticon ship, clearance locks were the easiest way to arrange for privacy.

“Brought you something,” said Deadlock, once they’d passed the blast-proof doors. He produced a little chunk of agate out of his subspace. It was mostly white, with streaks of red along its rough edges. A little sooty, like Deadlock himself.

Rung cradled it in his hands, soaking in the sight of something that wasn’t corridors or the void. He rubbed away soot with his thumb. _“You_ look hale and whole,” he said, after a while. “You seem to be among the minority, again.”

“Just lucky I guess,” Deadlock said. 

“In my experience, lucky is mostly a function of being well prepared,” Rung mused. “How is that dorsal augmentation holding up? I’ve seen some others with it coming back from the field and I’m worried that the weight is hurting the integrity of your spinal strut.”

Deadlock shrugged his heavy, formidable shoulders. “If it snaps on me, I’ll just crawl back to medical like I always do. You know me. I’m hard to kill.”

“Mm, I’m sure you’d love the opportunity to show off for my nurses,” Rung said. “Still, let’s get you looked at before you go. Come get me after you see Megatron.”

“Not seeing Megatron,” Deadlock said. “He’s booked straight through. Something big coming up.”

“Really,” Rung said, frowning. He’d assumed that high command was between projects. Why else would Megatron be setting blocks of time aside for him so easily now, when for years up until now there had barely been time for weekly debriefing?

“Anyway,” Deadlock said, “I’m not here long.”

“You never are,” Rung sighed.

“It’s fine by me,” Deadlock said. “Sitting on my aft playing politics won’t end the war any faster. I’m better off at the front, doing something useful.”

Rung ached a little, at that. It had been so many thousands of years, and Deadlock only seemed to burn brighter in his exhaustion, like a race car who performed best on fumes. Rung wished he would let himself take a break. But maybe Deadlock was afraid that if he did, the engine would stall out forever.

Rung shook off the melancholy with practiced discipline. “So where are they sending you now?”

“Probat,” Deadlock answered, “Soundwave says it’s mostly aliens, like that’s supposed to be a good thing. What good is killing a bunch of aliens gonna do? I’d rather be knocking off Autobots.” 

Rung stopped in the middle of the floor. “Probat? I thought—I knew there were deposits there, but—”

Deadlock paused and turned back to face him. “You heard about it already?” he said. “Yeah, we’re supposed to be wiping this whole species off the face of the planet. Some kind of organics, squishy I guess, won’t be hard. Most of the water-based ones pop like a soap bubble when you put a blaster round through them. You don’t even have to aim. Hey, uh, you okay?”

Rung could barely hear past the white noise screaming through his audials. His fingers dug into his palms. This was so much worse than just showing up with gunboats and colonizing a planet to take control of their mines. Bad enough that he’d learned to accept even that, but—

“I can’t believe this,” he said. “ _Wholesale slaughter?”_

Deadlock hesitated, and then frowned. “I guess you _didn’t_ know.” Deadlock shifted uncomfortably, and then looked away. “You’ve always been soft on aliens.”

Rung sucked in a rattling vent. “Excuse me,” he said, in his iciest tone. “There’s something I need to talk to Megatron about.”

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked this incredibly niche fic, please let us know! You can also share it on [Tumblr](https://desdemonafiction.tumblr.com/post/643847906184626176/your-bloodstained-laurel-wreath), [Twitter](https://twitter.com/neveralarch/status/1363932394722648078), or [DW](https://neveralarch.dreamwidth.org/112409.html).


End file.
